Collaborative ResearchCollaborative Research

Active One-to-One Research Projects

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Water and Environment

Atmospheric Circulation Signatures of the Space-Time Water Resources Distribution across Arid and Semi-Arid Middle Eastern Climates

Professor Dara Entekhabi
PI at MIT

Professor Annalisa Molini
PI at Masdar Institute

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Description

This research project seeks to improve the accuracy of future water availability scenarios over arid areas, by progressing in the understanding of

• existing connections between large‐scale complex atmospheric processes and the distribution of precipitation at regional and fine scales,
• the multi- scale dynamics of precipitation, and
• the presently mainly unexplored land surface processes (i.e. fluxes of energy and water) over arid areas.

Relevance

Possible tele-connections between large-scale climatic oscillations and water availability and security across the Middle East are of interest to a broad science audience at Masdar and to climatologists, hydrologists, water resources managers and policy makers in the UAE. It will impact the design of cities and infrastructure that need to account for water resources availability assessments that are informed about shifts in large-scale climate patterns.

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Distribution of FLUXNET Sites as a function of Climate (Koppen-Geiger Classification, from http://www.fluxnet.ornl.gov/).

 

Average annual precipitation (mm/yr) distribution over the Middle East for the period 1961-1990, obtained from the GPCC observation dataset (Hemming et al.2010).