Coastal Convection Modeling

Global warming is a major issue faced by society nowadays and to fight it we need to be able to make global climate projections
with less uncertainty. Despite numerous progresses in theoretical and computational modelling, there are still climatic
phenomena that remain partially unresolved because of the coarseness of the grid resolutions used in global climate and
numerical weather prediction models. Indeed, current do not capture well intense storms and precipitation events that occur in
coastal areas and around many tropical islands, which are known to impact in return the global climate variability and weather
patterns. We propose a simple model that is able to capture the key characteristics of coastal convection and its impact on the
global atmospheric circulation. For that purpose, we will use the multicloud model proposed by Khouider and his collaborators that
represents various cloud types based on a stochastic lattice model. The model has two uniform columns, one for the land and one
for the ocean, that interact with each other. Preliminary runs showed that the model is able to capture features of coastal
convection such the ability of rain systems to propagate from the land to the ocean column and vise-versa.

Faculty Supervisor:

Boualem Khouider

Student:

Partner:

Institut National Polytechnique Toulouse

Discipline:

Mathematics

Sector:

Education

University:

University of Victoria

Program: