Dust Research

Dust is an important component of the climate system. In fact the largest uncertainty in the radiative forcing of current climate is due to dust.
My research on dust has focussed on understanding the mechanisms that generate dust in key source regions of the world. You'll find more on dust research, including our field experiment in the Bodele Depression, Chad, the world's largest source of dust, here.

African Rainfall Variability

A large part of my research and my recent graduate student's research follows the aims of CLIVAR, an internationally recognised scientific arm of The World Climate Research Programme (WCRP). CLIVAR aims to extend our ability to predict intraseasonal and interannual climatic variability over longer time-scales and larger geographic regions, for the ultimate benefit of the world's societies.

Much of our climate variability work has an African focus (see the CLIVAR Variability of the African Climate System VACS pages for more details), with particular attention being paid to southern Africa. The mechanisms associated with extreme rainfall over southern Africa, for example, have been analysed using both observational and model data (see JGR paper and note in BAMS )


Find out more about our work on Atmospheric GCMs and coupled GCMs


General Work on African Climate

Including my work on the CLIVAR VACS panel , I have:

• developed the African Climate Atlas

• taught on a number of World Met Organisation CLIPS Seasonal forecasting Workshops (Niamey, Niger; Nairobi, Kenya, and Qatar)

• led the DFID/Defra African Climate Report in the run-up to the 2005 G8, which featured both Africa and Climate as the key agendas
Together with the co-authors of the African climate report, the DFID/Defra work has been developed and written up as a paper currently in review in BAMS

• helped to organise the southern African workshop on climate variability (Tanzania, 2006)

• worked as a contributing author on the Africa chapter of the third and fourth IPCC Assessment

• organised a workshop on UK-South African climate work as part of the Royal Society SA Day January 2006

Go to Richard's publications

Go to Richard's Home Page

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