Monsoon environments. The horizontal lines enclose the limits of the tropics (general limit of wet evergreen forests) and subtropics (limit of mangroves and swamp forests). It's interesting to compare this map to where annual rainfall occurs: why does Borneo, for example, get consistent rainfall when it is under the rainbelt for so little time?
     Green stars show where I have done fieldwork or carried out studies. For reference, red indicates areas where the highest plant biodiversity is found (see e.g. Brummitt et al. 2020).

This research is part of UKCEH's response to the Climate & Land and Flood & Drought Impacts challenges of UKCEH's Science Challenges.

​Drought and flood are critically important extreme events in monsoonal ecosystems.

1. Tropical Wetlands. Taking recent developments in the JULES model (better river routing, overbank inundation) and testing them out in monsoon environments.
2. Mapping the width and intensity of the Tropical Rain-Belt (TRB). The red and blue bands on the map left show a good approximation of the current location of the TRB (aka. Inter-Tropical Convergence Zone, ITCZ). According to Byrne et al. (2018), the location of both branches of the tropical rain belt is fairly consistent, but it changes in width and intensity. I would like to create a map similar to the red-and-blue-bands map left, but with intensity and width data AND a version of that for future environments too (possibly based on PRIMAVERA data from NCAS).
3. Soil moisture in tropical monsoon agriculture
   Monsoonal agriculture is dependent on the spatial imprint of soil moisture left by the annual oscillation of the TRB. Recent developments in high-resolution climate modelling have greatly improved our knowledge of precipitation (PRIMAVERA), however simulation of soil moisture dynamics remains approximate in many ecosystems. This project would apply tools from MOCABORS to produce a state-of-the-art characterisation of landscape-variation in soil moisture to support climate-smart, precision agriculture and validation of the Land Surface Model JULES. Link to TASHAM.
4. Extreme events in monsoonal ecosystems. Using a globalised coupled model approach (either UM_JULES or UKESM) to look at drought and other extreme events in a variety of ecosystems. My plan is for this to be a NERC New Investigator Grant proposal expanding on the ideas I discussed in Marthews et al. (2019) and Marthews et al. (2020).

More information:

• Work with SEARRP and GEWEX (?), and possibly also the new (Sep 2021) WCRP/WWRP International Monsoons Project Office (IMPO) at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM) in Pune, India.
  
• In September 2017 I co-organised the iLEAPS 5th International Science meeting held in Oxford, UK, and co-convened the session on Extreme Events.
• NASA has several programs related to Climate Applications, Air Quality and the Sustainable Development Goals too.

Simon's key science questions for Hydro-JULES from JULES annual meeting 2018:

• How will hydrological systems respond to current and future climate variability, in data-sparse regions under non-stationary conditions?
• Can new observational and modelling techniques improve our understanding of how high-intensity convective precipitation drives flooding?
• How will changes in land-use and land management affect surface permeability, soil water storage, runoff, river flows and flood inundation?
• Can a coupled approach quantify risks of of fluvial, pluvial, coastal and groundwater flooding more effectively?
• How will biogeochemical and nutrient cycles respond to current and future variability in the hydrological cycle, especially under changing climate and land-cover?
• Can assimilation of observed hydrological states and fluxes (e.g., soil moisture and stream flow) improve hydrological and meteorological predictions, and on what time-scales?
• Can uncertainty in large-scale hydrological predictions be attributed to specific hydrological processes in order to target future process-based research?
• What is the sensitivity of Earth system components to changing hydrology (e.g., vegetation, carbon cycle, aerosols, land ice, sea ice, ocean circulation and biogeochemistry).