I am an IST-bridge Marie Curie postdoctoral fellow at Institute of Science and Technology Austria. My broad research interest is tropical convection and dynamics. I use a range of tools including theory, modeling and observations to study convection and how they interact with large-scale circulation. I completed my Ph.D in Climate Science at the University of New South Wales in Sydney Australia. My Ph.D research was about understanding extreme precipitation and its links with convective organisation.

Research

1.Organization of convection

In idealized simulations of radiative-convective equilibrium, the organization of deep convection has been found to be very important for not only the local weather and climate, but also the mean climate. This implies that these small- and meso-scale processes may also influence large-scale processes. I am interested in understanding how processes across different scales interact and whether a better representation of these small-scale processes would benefit the simulation of larger-scale phenomena.

2.Tropical precipitation extremes

Tropical precipitation extremes tend to increase with rising temperatures. However, there are large uncertainties in terms of the rate of increase. Our current understanding of future precipitation extremes are mainly based on coarse-resolution global climate models (GCMs). One major criticism of such models is that the convective processes are parameterized, making it less appropriate for studying tropical precipitation extremes.

3.Tropical thermodynamics

Observations and models show different rates of warming in the upper troposphere over the tropics. To understand why they differ, we need to understand the fundamental questions: what determines the thermal structure of the tropical atmosphere? The simple theoretical picture is that the horizontal temperature in the tropical free troposphere is roughly uniform and the vertical lapse rates are close to moist-adiabat. However, that is not enough to explain the model-observation differences. What is missing in our understandings?