School of Earth and Environment
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Sophie Cowie Sophie Cowie

Postgraduate Student

Telephone number: +44(0) 113 34 34931
Email address: eesc@leeds.ac.uk
Room: 11.121

Knippertz Working Group

Biography

Project details

Project Title: Mechanisms of Peak Winds and Dust Emissions

Supervisors: Dr Peter Knippertz

Funding: European Research Council

Start date: 1st October 2010

Project Description:

The Sahara Desert is the worlds largest source of mineral dust into the atmosphere. However, understanding of the key meteorological processes which facilitate dust emissions is far from adequate, particularly in the crucial West Africa region. The key aim of this project is to collect, validate and analyse as much observational data as possible to better understand the lower boundary layer  processes which entrain dust into the atmosphere. Although focussing on Western Africa, other major dust source regions with better observational coverage may be considered too.

Dust emission events as identified from the ww present weather code surface reporting stations will be separated into mechanisms including;

  • haboobs
  • dust devils
  • convective plumes
  • Low Level Jets( LLJs)

Using a range of available observational data such as; surface stations, profilers, radiosondes, pilot balloons and satellite, the relative importance of these mechanisms will be deduced. A robust statistical analysis will also be performed on each mechanism. In conjunction with this a detailed climatology will be compiled, looking into the diurnal and annual cycles, geographical variations, inter-annual variability etc. of the dust emission events.

As part of the larger ERC funded project: Desert Storms - Towards an Improved Representation of Meteorological Processes in Models of Mineral Dust Emission (short title - Desert Storms), I will also support model evaluation and case study activities through the large observational data set described above.

Biography:

  • BSc Meteorology and Oceanography with a Year in Industry from the University of East Anglia, 2005-2009
  • Assistant Forecaster (Industrial placement) with WeatherQuest Ltd in Norwich, 2007-2008
  • Final year dissertation at UEA: Mesoscale Convective Systems (MSCs) over the UK
  • Data quality and Image Processing engineer with VEGA in Space, 2009-2010