Dr Yoko Tsushima
Yoko works to quantify and reduce uncertainty in climate change, through understanding and improving the representation of cloud-radiative processes.
Areas of expertise
- Clouds, radiation budget, and feedbacks in satellite observations, GCMs, and cloud resolving models
- Development of metrics to assess GCM cloud radiative fields and feedbacks
- Radiative feedback in the seasonal cycle
- Modelling of cloud radiative effects
Current activities
Cloud feedback is currently the largest uncertainty in GCM predictions of climate sensitivity under climate change. Yoko works on understanding cloud-radiation fields and feedbacks using satellite observations and GCMs, including the development of metrics to assess radiative feedbacks in climate models. Yoko also collaborates with colleagues in the global cloud resolving model group in Japan and is contributing to the Cloud Feedback Model Intercomparison Project Phase 2(CFMIP2).
Career background
Yoko has been a member of Understanding Climate Change since she joined the Met Office in 2009. Prior to joining the Met Office, Yoko worked in the Global Warming Research Program at the Frontier Research Centre for Global Change in Japan Marine-Earth Science and Technology, where she worked with Suki Manabe, one of the pioneers of climate simulation research, on radiative feedback in the seasonal cycle.
Yoko completed a PhD in "Cloud and total influence of the radiative feedback on the annual variation of global mean surface temperature" at the Department of Geophysics, University of Tokyo. Yoko also has a masters degree in geophysics and a bachelors degree in physics, both from the University of Tokyo. She was supervised by Prof. Terry Nakajima during her PhD course in the university. Yoko has been working on cloud, radiation and feedbacks since then. She also has been involved in Japanese climate model development through the modelling of cloud radiative effects in the radiative transfer routines.