Research Fellow in Aerosol cloud-climate interactions (ENVEE1410)

Are you an ambitious atmospheric scientist looking for your next challenge? Do you want to work with world leaders to understand aerosol-cloud interactions? Do you want to further your career in one of the UK’s leading research-intensive Universities?

The overarching objective of the NERC funded ADVANCE project is to constrain and improve the representation of cloud responses to aerosols by challenging models with observations from real-world-laboratory sulphur dioxide emissions generated by non-explosive volcanic activity. Using observations and models from global climate to km-scale high resolution, we will test whether: 1) sulphur dioxide emissions form sulphate aerosol that seed clouds, leading to a detectable reduction of cloud droplet sizes, 2) the reduction in cloud droplet sizes leads to reduced droplet coalescence, reduced rainfall and hence a detectable impact on cloud liquid water and cloud reflectivity.

ADVANCE will use a well-observed volcanic event to test these two hypotheses and quantify the associated uncertainty in anthropogenic aerosol-climate interactions. This will lead to improved representation of aerosol impacts in weather forecasting and climate modelling, providing more robust future climate scenarios.

You will be working with scientists from the Universities of Exeter and Cambridge to successfully deliver the Leeds component of the NERC funded ADVANCE project.

Your main role will be to carry out regional-scale modelling and process-level evaluation. You will explore aerosol-cloud interaction with the most realistic weather forecast tools currently available using spatial resolutions of <1km and domains ~3000km, allowing cloud-scale dynamics, cloud production and cloud dissipation to be accurately modelled. This km-scale modelling allows us to study cloud dynamical feedbacks allowing us to test buffering hypotheses.

To explore the post further or for any queries you may have, please contact: 

Prof Paul Field, Professor of Climate Science, email: p.field@leeds.ac.uk; 

or 

Prof Ken Carslaw

Tel: +44(0)113 343 1597, email: k.carslaw@leeds.ac.uk

Closing Date: 21 Aug 2020
Category: Research