UACSURF · Understanding atmospheric circulation from a surface perspective
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2015-04-01 → 2017-08-08
- EU contribution
- €195,455
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Understanding atmospheric circulation from a surface perspective
While the thermodynamic effects of rising concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are largely well understood, theoretical and experimental work on the effect of a warming planet on atmospheric dynamics is relatively scarce. This limits our ability to detect, understand and predict the effect of climate change on atmospheric circulation and weather regimes, which cause extreme events ranging from storms over heavy precipitation to draughts or heat waves. The present project aims to make a contribution to advance that understanding by examining the effect of drag on atmospheric circulation and its representation in weather and climate models.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
Circulation changes are at the heart of changes in both regional precipitation and temperature and extreme events ranging from heavy precipitation to heat waves or cold spells. Understanding and modelling circulation changes in a warming climate therefore constitutes an emerging challenge for climate science. General circulation models still struggle to represent important features of the large-scale circulation in the present-day climate, which undermines confidence in future projections. The present project is to combine a small-scale process-level with a large-scale dynamical perspective to investigate how drag processes at the Earth's surface associated with boundary-layer turbulence, orography and gravity waves affect large-scale circulation. Our aim is to develop a climatological view of the distribution and variability of individual components of surface drag as represented in general circulation models and to understand which processes or model parametrisations are responsible for current model biases especially in the representation of mid-latitude storm tracks.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- THE UNIVERSITY OF READING · ReadingCoordinatorUnited Kingdom
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union