Evaluating Southern Ocean aerosol in the Australian climate model

Supervisory Team: 

• Sonya Fiddes
• Marc Mallet
• Ruhi Humphries

Brief project description:

Aerosol, tiny solid or liquid particles suspended in the atmosphere, are one of the most uncertain aspects of climate modelling, having an important influence on the simulation of clouds and radiation (IPCC AR5, WG1, Ch8, 2013). Marine aerosol, such as sea salt or biogenic aerosol, make up a large part of this uncertainty (Carslaw et al. 2013, Nature). Over the last five years, numerous observations have been made of marine aerosol, providing an opportunity to evaluate models with recent and high-quality data. The Australian Community Climate and Earth System Simulator - Coupled Model 2 (ACCESS-CM2) model has an online aerosol scheme which can simulate the formation and influence of aerosol (Bi et al. 2020, JSHESS). This project will evaluate the ACCESS-CM2 aerosol output, including its size and composition, against the recent field observations to understand how well the model is able to simulate aerosol variability and where the model might be improved.

Skills students will develop during this research project:

In this project the student will learn to code in python on the national supercomputer Gadi, giving them experience in high performance computing environments. They will also learn to handle and manipulate large climate model output, and how to use observational data effectively for model evaluation. Furthermore, the student will gain an understanding of marine aerosol variability, how well our current climate model is able to reproduce this and what the impacts of model aerosol biases are on the climate.