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Photo of Dr Ruth Geen

Dr Ruth Geen

Research Fellow

Email:

Telephone: 01392 723612

Extension: (Streatham) 3612

My research aims to increase confidence in projections of future regional climate by building simple, conceptual pictures of the large-scale atmospheric dynamics governing climate phenomena. 

 

Projects

  • ArctiCONNECT

In April 2021 I joined James Screen’s team investigating the various pathways by which warming of the Arctic has been suggested to influence European climate and extreme weather. We are using Exeter’s idealised climate modelling framework Isca to pick apart these different proposed mechanisms and identify if and how the Arctic plays a role in European climate.

  • Dynamics of East Asian Monsoon Variability and Change (CSSP China)

State-of-the-art climate models show a variety of rainfall biases in the seasonality of the East Asian Summer Monsoon. Troublingly, in many cases these are similar or greater in size than the future rainfall changes the model predicts. Working with Hugo Lambert and Geoff Vallis, I am using simple understanding built up from idealised models to break down processes causing these biases and to try to improve our confidence in future change.

 

Previous work

  • Latent heat feedbacks onto climate 

Before coming to Exeter, I studied for my PhD in the Space and Atmospheric Physics group at Imperial College London, supervised by Arnaud Czaja and Joanna Haigh. My work there investigated the effects of latent heat release by water vapour on the climate system in aquaplanet models, in particular the effects on heat transport by midlatitude storms. My PhD thesis can be found here. 

  • Simple radiation scheme

As part of my PhD work, I developed a simple three band radiation scheme for the MITgcm. This accounts for water vapour and carbon dioxide, and separates the spectrum into shortwave, longwave window, and longwave non-window components, providing a more realistic alternative to using fixed optical depths, while still being fast to run. During a visit to MIT, working with John Marshall, in November 2015 I helped to incorporate this into the model source code repository, and it is available here. An adapted version of this scheme is also available in Isca.

 

Publications