Email: ajw1g19@soton.ac.uk
Alfred is an INSPIRE DTP candidate, studying for a PhD at the University of Southampton and based at the National Oceanography Centre Southampton. Having completed an integrated master’s in Geophysics at Southampton, Alfred is now specialising in palaeoclimate research with Professor Paul Wilson, Dr Richard Stockey and Dr Peter Hopcroft.
Alfred Wilson’s research concerns the Green Sahara Problem in palaeoclimate modelling. This is the long-standing failure of climate models to reproduce the intensification of monsoon rainfall and expansion of vegetation that occurred across North Africa during the mid-Holocene between 15-5 thousand years ago.
The Green Sahara Problem raises concerns that future climate projections made by the same models are unreliable because of their inability to simulate past examples of more extreme climate regimes. Alfred’s research is focussed on tuning a current IPCC-class climate model called UKESM using a new technique called Palaeoclimate Conditioning which was developed by Dr Peter Hopcroft (University of Birmingham) and Prof Paul Valdes (University of Bristol). The technique provides both historical and palaeoclimate observational targets to compare the model against should return a model that not only accurately simulates the Green Sahara, but which can also provide more reliable future climate projections at high resolution.