DTP: ARIES (Cohort 1)

Project: The Diurnal Cycle of the Maritime Continent and its Scale Interactions

Supervisors: Prof Adrian Matthews, Dr Rob Hall, Prof Karen Heywood, Dr Marina Azaneu

Find me at: j.mustafa@uea.ac.uk

Jack is a second year PhD student in the Centre for Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences (COAS) at the University of East Anglia (UEA) with research interests in the tropical meteorology and climatology. His project entails study of the diurnal cycle of rainfall and associated climate variables around Indonesia using reanalysis products, weather station data and passive acoustic data acquired from ocean gliders. The diurnal cycle exerts a strong influence on regional weather, but is complicated by complex island topography and various forms of equatorial atmospheric waves and oscillations. This project will contribute toward improved understanding of how regional conditions induced by low-frequency waves and oscillations affect the diurnal cycle, which offers potential to improve model representation of these dynamics in turn.

Jack’s studentship is linked to NERC-funded Large Grant TerraMaris (overview presentation here), a multinational campaign to better understand convective processes around the Maritime Continent using high-resolution modelling and a large-scale field campaign in Indonesia and Christmas Island now planned for Jan-Mar 2023, in which Jack is intended to take part.

Jack enjoys making science accessible through outreach work. Alongside Beth Siddle, he helped create oceanography material for children for Norwich Science Festival 2020 (YouTube video here), for which the pair were recently nominated for a UEA engagement award. He is actively looking forward to future opportunities to showcase his own research!