PhD Studentship

Faculty of Environment

Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) CASE-funded PhD project

Understanding and predicting rainfall in the Indian Monsoon

This Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) CASE-funded PhD project will be based at the University of Leeds, with co-supervisors at the Met Office, where the student will spend time on visits throughout the project. The project will require the student to visit research centres in India and will likely have opportunities to be involved in fieldwork.

Supervisors: John Marsham, Doug Parker, Stuart Webster (Met Office) and Jon Petch (Met Office). Contact: J.Marsham@leeds.ac.uk

This project will use unique high-resolution simulations for India, recently performed at the Met Office, to understand interactions between the rain-generating storms embedded in the monsoon and the monsoon itself. Globally, more than 60% of the population lives in a monsoon region. The Indian monsoon is one of the most important annual climatic patterns on Earth, bringing rainfall that is essential to a population that now exceeds one billion. Agriculture depends on the monsoon rains and unusual timings or intensities of rain can have enormous socio-economic impacts. Through it’s couplings with the global atmospheric and oceanic circulations, the effects of the Indian monsoon are felt across the globe.

Despite their importance, representing monsoons remains a major challenge for global weather and climate models. One of the major sources of error is that the deep convective clouds (cumulonimbus) that generate rain are unresolved by the grid-spacings used in global models. This is a long-standing problem, but recent advances in computing power have finally provided a way forward: it is now possible to run multi-day simulations over the Indian Ocean and the entire sub-continent at resolutions that explicitly capture the clouds. For the West African monsoon such simulations are providing unique insights. The Met Office have recently performed the first such simulations for the Indian monsoon region: the high-resolution model generates much more realistic cloud-systems than the standard model setup, and these will impact on the entire monsoon.

This project will evaluate and use the new simulations to understand how the clouds interact with the continental-scale monsoon flow, and how this is represented in models with resolutions varying from high-resolution “convection-permitting” runs to low-resolution runs with grid-spacings typical of a global climate model. The analysis will involve handling very large datasets from observations and the EMBRACE model, and devising novel ways of quantifying storm structure, behaviour and impacts. The project will assess which aspects of global models must be improved and assess the implications for weather and climate predictions. The joint supervision with Met Office staff will ensure practical application of the results to their seasonal to decadal prediction systems and climate research.

Full details at: http://www.see.leeds.ac.uk/admissions-and-study/research-degrees/icas/indian-monsoon/