Previous Research
Ph.D Work
I obtained my Phd from the University of Reading, U.K, where I was supervised by Suzanne Gray and Stephen Belcher. The title of my PhD thesis is Boundary-layer ventilation by baroclinic life cycles. The overall aim of the thesis was to identify physical processes within mid-latitude weather systems that are responsible for transporting pollutants out of the boundary layer and to quantify the efficiency of this transport. I took an idealised modeling approach to address this problem, simulating baroclinic life cycles with a boundary-layer parameterization scheme acting and passive tracers included to represent pollutants.My thesis can be split into 3 sections. The first aspect was understanding how the structure of the boundary layer varies on synoptic scales and how synoptic-scale weather systems influence the boundary-layer structure. Within this section I also investigated how and where air is exchanged between the boundary layer and free troposphere and vice-versa. The second section was to identify physical processes that transport pollutants. These were identified as turbulent mixing in the boundary layer, horizontal Ekman induced transport within the boundary layer and advection by the warm conveyor belt in the free troposphere. The third and final section of my thesis was to identify variables that control the efficiency of cyclones to ventilate the boundary layer, and therefore develop a diagnostic to estimate the amount of boundary-layer ventilation a given mid-latitude cyclone will produce. I found that the large-scale dynamics, the hence the ascent rate of the warm conveyor belt, determined the efficiency of cyclones to ventilate the boundary layer.
You can download a copy of my thesis here