Research Experience Placements Scheme (‘REP’)
The role of low-level clouds for the West African monsoon
Supervisors: Dr Peter Knippertz
The West African monsoon is one of the regions of the planet for which climate projections of precipitation into the 21st century do not even agree on the sign of the change. This uncertainty has important implications for the development of mitigation and adaptation strategies in this particularly vulnerable region, where a large portion of the population lives from rain-fed agriculture. One of the reasons for this problem is the notorious inability of climate models to realistically represent the complex processes in the land surface, ocean and atmosphere and their interactions that determine the strengths and geographical extend of the monsoon rainfalls.
This project will concentrate on one aspect of the monsoon system that has received surprisingly little attention in recent research activities: shallow low-level clouds over southern West Africa during the peak Sahel rainy season in summer. These clouds are usually not connected with precipitation, but have large impacts on the radiation and energy budget by reflecting sunlight back to space. The dataset used will be output from climate models made available through an international database for research leading up to the next Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The work will include downloading the data, selecting suitable geographical regions, calculating area averages, time series, correlations, comparing model output with observations etc.
Ultimately, this project will help to better understand the processes governing the occurrence and extend of these low-level clouds and their representation in models. This way it will help to address systematic errors in further developments of IPCC climate models to provide the urgently needed more reliable climate projections for the West African people.