Detecting and attributing aerosol influences on large-scale climate

Project

We will address the following research questions: 

  1. Which aspects of observed changes in mean temperature and precipitation are in response to aerosols, and how well can they be separated from greenhouse warming, internal climate variability, and natural influences? 
  2. Which observed rainfall changes are influenced by aerosols? 
  3. Which extreme events (drought or heavy rainfall) show a significant change in risk due to anthropogenic aerosols? 
  4. Can machine learning techniques better identify the aerosol signal and improve signal-to-noise ratio and detectability of aerosol responses in observations?

Techniques applied include detection and attribution methods, causal discovery methods, feature extraction and dimensionality reduction methods.

Supervisors

Gabi Hegerl (supervisor), Jakob Runge (co-supervisor), Peter Stott (MetOffice, non-academic advisor)

Secondments

3 months at the UK Met Office &3 months at DLR

Enrolment in Doctoral degree

PhD in Geosciences at University of Edinburgh

teaser image edinburghwhite bg