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

国际和平研究所的研究重点是非洲的气候变化，特别是萨赫勒地区的干旱。她计划通过进一步了解生态学以及生物物理和水文过程来增强她的背景，将这些新技术纳入大气环流模式实验，以包括对陆地表面过程的明确处理，探索可能涉及干旱期间沙尘产生及其对大气影响的反馈，并开发一个明确考虑沙尘层的大气加热模型，并将这些概念与在西非产生降雨的特定系统--东风波--联系起来。后者将需要研究地表能量和水平衡如何影响中层非洲东风急流。P.I.提出这项研究的目的是证明或反驳萨赫勒干旱中的地表反馈理论。

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.