MONSOON · Monsoons and climate change: roles of atmospheric and oceanic processes
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2018-11-01 → 2022-11-01
- EU contribution
- €195,455
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Monsoons and climate change: roles of atmospheric and oceanic processes
The overall aim of this project is to transform fundamental understanding of monsoon regions in a warming climate. Improving understanding of monsoons is a key science goal with societal implications: Monsoon regions are home to approximately half the global population, and the rainfall delivered by monsoons is vital for communities in Asia, Africa, Australia and the Americas. However, climate-model projections for how monsoon regions will change by the end of the 21st century are highly uncertain. This uncertainty makes it difficult for vulnerable regions to prepare for the impacts of climate change and highlights the lack of a robust understanding of the physical processes driving changes in monsoonal climates. Existing research has focused primarily on the roles of land processes, aerosols and natural variability (e.g. El Niño-Southern Oscillation) in shaping monsoons. However, the roles of radiative and oceanic processes in driving monsoonal climates are less well understood, and represent potential sources of uncertainty in future projections. To address this knowledge gap, in this project we used a range of climate simulations together with theory & observational data to advance understanding of how clouds, water vapour, carbon dioxide and ocean temperatures shape monsoon regions. The project was structured around two Work Packages (WPs) which address the following questions: WP1: How do the radiative effects of clouds, water vapour and carbon dioxide couple to monsoon circulations and shape their response to climate change? WP2: What role do ocean surface temperatures play in driving extreme temperatures in monsoon regions and across tropical continents? Below we describe the work performed to address each question, the main results achieved and the potential impacts.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
Monsoons affect more than half the world’s population yet the dynamics of monsoons are poorly understood. Climate models struggle to accurately simulate monsoons and projections of how these circulations will respond to climate change are highly uncertain. A transformed understanding of monsoon dynamics has the potential to improve both climate models and predictions of how this key feature of the climate system will respond to global warming.This project will use idealised climate-model simulations to quantify the impacts of clouds, water vapour, carbon dioxide, and ocean heat transport on changes in monsoon dynamics. These atmospheric and oceanic processes have recently been shown to affect the Hadley circulation and midlatitude storm tracks, but their influences on monsoons are unknown. To isolate and quantify the effect of each process on the monsoon response to climate change, a novel set of simulations employing the radiation-locking technique and a simple dynamic representation of ocean heat transport will be performed. This reduced-complexity methodology will deliver a greatly improved mechanistic understanding of monsoons under climate change. The enhanced knowledge of monsoon dynamics that results from this project will ultimately lead to improvements in climate models and to better predictions of how monsoons will change in the future, with important benefits for societies around the world.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- THE CHANCELLOR, MASTERS AND SCHOLARS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD · OxfordCoordinatorUnited Kingdom
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union