Bachelor or Master thesis - Trends in seasonal water deficits

Background

Droughts have major impacts on fluxes between land and the atmosphere, agricultural production, and the carbon cycle. Future projections of drought magnitude and frequencies are surprisingly divergent and interpretations of trends from Earth System Model outputs have drawn conflicting pictures of drought impact trends in a heating climate. Trends in precipitation, evapotranspiration, soil moisture, and runoff often point in different directions and are relevant for different aspects of what may be referred to as a “droughts”.

Aim

You will target seasonal water deficits as an impact-relevant quantity measuring the severity of droughts. Using outputs from multiple models of the the Climate Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6), you will derive simulated cumulative water deficit (CWD) time series across the globe and investigate their long-term trends and differences in model projections.

This project builds on a completed BSc thesis and extends its focus to a larger set of model outputs and scenarios. If addressed as a MSc topic, there is a clear possiblity for a publication as a thesis outcome.

Requirements

• Most important: High motivation to work on questions related to land-atmosphere exchange and the water cycle - everything else can be learned!
• Interest in working with large datasets from Earth System Model outputs.
• Experience working with R or other data science tools are an advantage.
• The student writes the thesis in English.

Supervision

• Prof. Benjamin Stocker