UROP

The following projects are being offered for summer 2025. This page will be updated as more projects become available.

Please contact the relevant staff with a CV and brief (no more than a paragraph) statement about your interest in the project.

Forecast-based attribution of extreme weather events in March 2023 – Donghyun Lee
Closing date: Two weeks before the college UROP deadline
As the global temperature rises, record-shattering weather extreme events occur more frequently. Attribution studies have analysed climate model ensemble simulations under the factual and counterfactual climate forcing conditions to understand anthropogenic impacts on the probability of extreme weather events. During this project period, we will explore the record-shattering extreme events in the observation in March 2023 and analyse forecast ensemble simulations instead of climate models, which have additional benefits constraining dynamic processes triggering the extreme events.

Detecting space weather currents using the OneWeb satellite mega-constellation - Martin Archer
Closing date: Two weeks before the college UROP deadline
The changing environmental conditions in near-Earth space lead to a myriad of hazards on our critical infrastructure, collectively known as space weather. Changes in the solar wind and their effects on our space environment are communicated from space to the ground by electrical currents that flow along Earth’s magnetic field lines to/from the ionised top of our atmosphere. New mega-constellations of 100s-1000s of satellites in low Earth orbit could dramatically improve global space weather monitoring. You will explore magnetic field data from the OneWeb constellation – 636 satellites distributed across 12 orbital planes – investigating its capability of detecting space weather currents. You will develop bespoke methods to calibrate and denoise the data, comprehensively assessing the OneWeb constellation’s data availability, cleanliness, and sensitivity. This will provide an outlook and future steps for harnessing mega-constellations for space weather monitoring.

Exploring gravity wave parametrization to alleviate climate model biases in the tropical stratosphere – Aleena Moolakkunnel-Jaison
Closing date: Two weeks before the college UROP deadline
The stratosphere is the second major layer of the atmosphere, starting from around 12 km and extending up to 50 km in altitude. A reasonable representation of stratospheric variability in climate models is essential to improve our weather and climate predictions. The equatorial stratosphere exhibits two key wind and temperature patterns: the quasi-biennial oscillation (QBO) and the semi-annual oscillation (SAO). Research highlights that these phenomena significantly influence extra-tropical variability, which, in turn, have significant surface weather impacts, like ‘the beast from the east’ in UK. However, our climate models struggle to produce a reasonable representation of QBO and SAO, and part of this is attributed to biases in gravity wave (GW) parametrisation in models. This project aims to investigate the impact of modifying GW parametrization on the model simulation of QBO and SAO, exploring potential pathways to improve the representation of both phenomena.

The following projects are being offered for summer 2024.This page will be updated as more projects become available.

Please contact the relevant staff with a CV and brief (no more than a paragraph) statement about your interest in the project.

Does solar wind turbulence drive or dampen space weather? - Martin Archer
Closing date: Two weeks before the college UROP deadline
The changing conditions in the space environment around our planet lead to hazards on our everyday technology, known as space weather,. These impacts result from the dynamic interaction of solar wind plasma that stream's off of the Sun with Earth's magnetic field in space, the magnetosphere. The solar wind, like winds in Earth's atmosphere, is highly turbulent, yet how this turbulence affects the solar wind - magnetosphere interaction is not well understood. You will run a series of global simulations to explore how solar wind turbulence affects the dynamics of Earth's magnetosphere, and thus space weather.

Determining the Monsoon's Role in Jet Stream Dynamics - Philipp Breul

Closing date: 11th December 2023

Weather in the midlatitudes (where the UK is located) is strongly influenced by the midlatitude jet stream. The jet stream is a band of confined strong winds that extend from the surface high into the atmosphere (~10km). It is therefore of high importance for the regional climate in the midlatitudes, governing aspects like precipitation, temperature and windiness.  Previous studies have found a far ranging influence of the monsoon in the Indian Ocean region onto the southern hemispheric jet, using atmospheric models. In this project, we will be looking for evidence of this influence in real atmospheric data. Given the jet stream's crucial role in shaping regional climates, advancing our understanding is of great significance for understanding future climate change impacts.

Long-term trends in magnetometer parameters - Chris Carr

Closing date: Two weeks before the college UROP deadline

The European Space Agency’s four-spacecraft ‘Cluster’ mission has been in orbit since the year 2000 and as Imperial is the lead institution for the magnetometer instruments we have accumulated the equivalent of 88 years-worth of orbit-by-orbit parameters which characterise the performance of the sensors. Over this time, certain periodicities are revealed, which may be linked to orbit, temperature, or other external factors. This project will seek to characterise this behaviour, with the aim of improving our knowledge about the overall accuracy of the instruments and seeking to simplify the in-flight calibration processes for the final few years of the mission, which is expected to operate until 2025.

Locating contrails in multi-camera imagery - Edward Gryspeerdt

Closing date: Two weeks before the college UROP deadline

The warming effect of contrails on the climate is over half the total climate impact of aviation, but their properties and evolution are poorly understood from observations, hampering modelling efforts. In this project, you will use multiple new ground-based cameras to locate contrails in 3D, tracking their vertical development. This will provide new constraints on the behaviour of the only man-made cloud type.