Faculty Award for Women: Causes of Drought in the West African Sahel

PI的研究重点是气候变化， 非洲，特别是萨赫勒地区的干旱。 她计划加强 通过进一步了解生态学， 生物物理和水文过程，将这些纳入其中 大气环流模式实验的新技术， 包括明确处理陆面过程，以探讨 干旱期间可能产生粉尘的反馈 及其对大气层的影响，并建立一个模型 大气加热明确考虑了尘埃 层， 并将这些概念与特定的系统联系起来， 西非上空降雨，东风波。 后者将 需要研究地表能量和水的平衡 影响非洲中层偏东急流。 私家侦探提出 这项研究的目的是证明或反驳这一理论 在萨赫勒干旱中的地表反馈。

The PI's research has focused on climate variability in Africa, especially drought in the Sahel. She plans to enhance her background by gaining a further understanding of ecology and of biophysical and hydrological processes, to incorporate these new skills in the general circulation model experiments to include explicit treatment of land surface processes, to explore the feedback that may involve dust generation during drought episodes and its impact on the atmosphere and to develop a model of atmospheric heating that explicitly considers dust layers, and to link these concepts to the specific systems that generate rainfall over West Africa, the easterly waves. The latter will require a study of how the surface energy and water balance affect the mid-level African easterly jet. The P.I. proposes this research with the goal of proving or disproving the theory of land surface feedback in the Sahel droughts.