Volcanic impact on tropical precipitation

The largest signal in tropical precipitation over the historical period is found after large volcanic eruptions. Tackling the volcanic impact on the tropical hydroclimate is, however, extremely challenging as the signal-to-noise ratio is low and the capability of the recent generation of climate models to simulate the tropical hydrological cycle is limited. While there is in general not much improvement in tropical precipitation over the CMIP period (Fiedler et al, 2020) a shift in the continental land response to volcanic eruptions is found from an underestimation in CMIP3 to an overestimation in CMIP5/ CMIP6.
 

The goal of the master project is to investigate and to quantify the volcanic impact on tropical precipitation. For this, historical CMIP multimodel simulations from all three CMIP phases will be analysed in addition to specific MPI-ESM simulations with different vertical and horizontal resolutions and the key dependencies will be identified.

Supervisors: Claudia Timmreck and Traute Crueger