Dr Dave Rowell

Areas of expertise

• African climate variability

• European climate variability and change

• Mechanisms and uncertainty of future regional climate change

• Seasonal predictability

My Publications - Rowell, D

Current activities

Dave's work is part of the new Future Climate for Africa programme funded by the Department for International Development (DFID) and the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC). This programme aims to "advance our understanding and prediction of African climate change on 5 to 40 year timescales, and provide better integration of science into longer-term decision making, leading to improved climate risk management and the protection of lives and livelihoods". It consists of a pan-Africa model development project and four multi-disciplinary regionally-focused projects. Dave works on the Management Board of two regional projects, HyCRISTAL (East Africa) and AMMA-2050 (West Africa), and is actively involved in the climate research element of HyCRISTAL. This research - with others in the consortium - will work towards a better understanding of the processes and mechanisms that drive the models' uncertainty of future climate change over East Africa. Hopefully this will enable us to provide an 'expert judgement' of the trustworthiness of these multi-model projections for decision-relevant metrics of climate change over East Africa, with a particular focus on the Lake Victoria Basin.

Career background

Dave graduated from the University of York with a BSc in Maths with Physics, and then completed a PhD at the University of Reading in short-range rainfall forecasting over the Sahel.

For the first part of his Met Office career Dave worked on understanding tropical climate variability, using General Circulation Model (GCM) and observational data, with a particular focus on the African Sahel. Other research interests included atmospheric decadal variability, global seasonal predictability, and European climate variability. He was one of the founding leaders of the Climate Variability and Predictability (CLIVAR) - Climate of the 20th Century (C20C) project, and was also involved in a number of other international projects.

From 2001, Dave's work focused on understanding the mechanisms and uncertainty of future regional climate change, with particular focus on Europe, North America and the tropics. This involved the analysis of both idealised model experiments and multi-model ensembles. Again, he was actively involved in a number of international projects: PRUDENCE (as a workpackage coordinator), ENSEMBLES, WAMME and the Met Office led PRECIS project.

Since January 2010 Dave's work has again focused on modelling African climate variability and change.