Ashar Aslam

Profile

I am a fourth year PhD student in the Atmospheric and Cloud Dynamics research group in the Institute for Climate and Atmospheric Science, funded by the SENSE CDT.

I graduated with an MEarthSci Earth Sciences degree from the University of Oxford in 2021. My Master’s project used an energetics framework to understand and provide reasoning for deep convection biases in the Met Office convective-permitting climate simulation CP4-Africa, relative to its convective-parameterised counterpart R25-Africa, which had a pre-existing bias relative to observations. I began my PhD at Leeds in October 2021 – my thesis is entitled “Severe Weather over Southeast Asia”. My research is centred around the objective of improving our understanding of the multi-scale variability in extreme rainfall over the Maritime Continent (another name for the thousands of islands and shallow seas in Southeast Asia). In this project, I am:

• Using a combination of satellite, radar and reanalysis data to better understand processes which influence patterns in extreme rainfall across the Maritime Continent.
• Analysing the interactions between large-scale modes of variability (e.g. the Madden-Julian Oscillation, El Niño Southern Oscillation), the diurnal cycle and synoptic-scale processes using global and regional numerical weather models of varying complexity.
• Evaluating the representation of finer-scale processes regulating precipitation patterns and development of convection over the Maritime Continent using high-resolution, sub-km model runs.

Research interests

• Tropical meteorology and oceanography
• Convection
• Atmospheric and ocean physics
• Climate patterns and teleconnections
• Air-sea interactions

Qualifications

• MEarthSci Earth Sciences, University of Oxford

Research groups and institutes

• Atmospheric and Cloud Dynamics
• Institute for Climate and Atmospheric Science