Research Funding News – May 2014

School of Earth and Environment and CGS academics have had a series of successful research grants.

Graham Stuart (Principle Investigator) and Andy Hooper have had their proposal, Defining models of glacial isostatic adjustment in West Antarctica and Antarctic Peninsula (UKANET): better constraints on Earth structure and uplift, funded by a NERC standard grant (£767k to Leeds). The project involves the deployment, for 2 years, of 10 over-wintering broadband seismometers in West Antarctica and Antarctic Peninsula to determine their seismic structure, together with some GPS fieldwork to test weather models for InSAR earth deformation studies.

John Marsham (Principle Investigator) and Doug Parker’s project SWAMMA (Saharan West African Monsoon Multiscale Analysis) has been funded by NERC (£1.0M, with £665k at Leeds and £350k at the University of Reading). SWAMMA will quantify how the coupled processes of the Saharan monsoon system, including deep cumulonimbus convection (“thunderstorms”) and Saharan dust, determine the seasonal behaviour of the monsoon rainfall. The project will evaluate the role of these physical processes over Africa in determining the extent of seasonal rainfall, relative to the effects of the monsoon’s boundary conditions, which are provided by the global climate system, and how the monsoon feeds back onto the global scale. The project will test how these African and global effects control the seasonal stability of the monsoon rainfall and its variability: to what extent is a wet or dry year in West Africa determined by global or regional processes?

More updates from these investigations will be posted on here as the projects progress.

INCOMPASS – Investigating The Dynamics Of The Indian Monsoon

CGS’ Doug Parker and John Marsham have won a major research grant as part of a joint UK-Indian consortium studying the dynamics of the Indian Monsoon. The INCOMPASS project will involve a large-scale field campaign in India and over the adjacent oceans, in the year 2016, and a programme of computer modelling, with the specific aim of improving predictions of the monsoon.

The brown regions are high topography, which act as barriers to moisture rich air coming from the Indian ocean to the south. Image: Wikimedia Commons

The Indian Monsoon is one of the most significant climate systems on Earth. The seasonal changes in the monsoon winds, which bring the annual rainfall to most parts of India in the summer, are one of the most intense and robust patterns in our climate system. However, computer models show very large errors for this region, whether predicting the weather a few days in advance, or representing the current climate of India. Climate projections for future Indian rainfall also have significant uncertainties.

The INCOMPASS project aims to explain the physical processes which lead to these errors in models, and to derive strategies to represent the processes more accurately. In particular, the project will explore the ways in which the land surface, and the patterns of land-use, lead to responses in the regional climate.

Monsoon rains over Mumbai. Image: Wikimedia Commons

The project will support a 3-year postdoctoral research position in Leeds. The research group at Leeds will contribute to the airborne research programme and will lead the analysis of new high-resolution models of the monsoon, using the Met Office forecast model. Airborne observations will be made with the UK Facility for Airborne Atmospheric Measurements (FAAM) BAe146 research aircraft, and will be supplemented by a large number of extra balloon-soundings from the operational weather stations across India. A network of ground stations will measure the water and energy budgets at the surface, and how these change during the seasonal progression of the monsoon. High resolution models, which capture the dynamics of individual storms, will enable researchers to evaluate the feedbacks between the land surface and the atmosphere, which are governed by these storms.

INCOMPASS is a consortium of UK and Indian partners, led by the University of Reading and by the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), with the University of Leeds, the NERC National Centre for Atmospheric Science (NCAS) and Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (CEH), the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), the National Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (NCMRWF), the CSIR National Aerospace Laboratories (NAL), the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), the India Meteorological Department (IMD) and the Met Office. The project is jointly funded by NERC and the Indian Ministry of Earth Sciences (MoES). Two sister projects were also funded, to study Indian Ocean dynamics, and to study atmospheric aerosol processes in the monsoon system.

The extreme flooding in the summer of 2010 was due to high volumes of rainfall during the monsoon season that year.
Image: NASA

 

Ekbal

More information:
[1] http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=45177
[2] http://www.see.leeds.ac.uk/admissions-and-study/research-degrees/icas/indian-monsoon