About me
I'm an NCAS research associate and I work on the development and improvement of a high resolution, global version of the UM-UKCA model for air quality applications. This model currently runs with a horizontal resolution of 0.37x0.56 degrees (corresponding to a grid length of ~40km) and includes a tropospheric chemistry scheme.
We have used UM-UKCA to investigate the impact of megacities on gaseous pollutants such as ozone, nitrogen oxides and carbon monoxide. The ability of this model to represent the diurnal variation and probability distribution of pollutants in megacities such as London and Paris, as well as background pollution levels in rural locations, has been evaluated by comparison with UK and European observational datasets.
We are also interested in exploring how the non-linear effects in the chemistry are reflected in model integrations at different horizontal resolution by comparing our high resolution model run to a model run at typical climate resolution (~150km), therefore assessing the suitability of long, climate integrations to predict changes in air quality under future climate conditions.
The natural application of this type of model is in understanding the impacts of climate change on air quality at the urban and regional scale, providing a very useful tool to answer policy relevant questions.
CAREER: I joined CAS in Feb '06 after spending a 4 year period working in the Regional Climate Modelling team at the UK Met Office, Hadley Centre. I completed my PhD at University College London in 2002.
PROJECTS: since joining CAS I've been involved in the following national and international projects:
- ACTIVE and SCOUT-O3: focusing on tropical deep convection and Troposphere-Stratosphere transport
- MesoNET: focus on air quality using high resolution modelling
- MEGAPOLI: a European FP7 project with a focus on global impacts of megacity pollution plumes
SCIENTIFIC INTERESTS:
- Evaluating the effect of model horizontal resolution on the representation of Meteorological and chemical transport processes
- Understanding and improving chemical processes and emissions for a better representation of the urban environment in global models
- Climate impacts on air quality
