There is potential for a $7.5k scholarship as the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science has honours scholarships available for students interested in working on climate science projects. These scholarships competitive and award will be based on academic merit, the project area, and your commitment to your program of study.
Organised thunderstorms and the climate
Supervisor: Martin Singh
Field of study: Atmospheric science
Support offered: Potential for honours scholarship through the Centre of Excellence for Weather of the 21st Century.
Clouds are gregarious---they tend to clump together in various ways to form larger-scale weather systems. In the tropics, this means that most of the rain falls within mesoscale convective systems. Climate models have a hard time simulating these systems because of their relatively coarse resolution. Does this matter? In this project we seek to understand how the way in which convention organises affects and is affected by the larger-scale climate. Do bigger convective systems form in moister or dryer environments? Do they form in stable or unstable environments? Can we understand why?
Monsoons and the Hadley Cell in a changing climate
Supervisor: Martin Singh
Field of study: Atmospheric science
Support offered: Potential for honours scholarship through the Centre of Excellence for Weather of the 21st Century.
The future of the Australian monsoon and the Hadley Cell within which it is embedded remains uncertain. Climate model projections disagree on how the monsoon will change under warming—some say it will get stronger, some say it will get weaker. In this project we will focus on the Hadley Circulation, the large-scale global circulation of which the monsoons are one component. We will apply theories of the Hadley Cell based on the momentum and energy budgets to diagnose why different models predict different future changes in Hadley Cell strength. This diagnosis will provide a starting point to better constrain future changes in the Hadley Cell (and the Australian monsoon) under global warming.
For further information contact: Martin Singh