Joe Osborne

Current work

I am an Associate Research Fellow in the Exeter Climate Systems group, working on the EuroClim project. This project aims to improve European seasonal weather forecasts. To this end I am currently investigating the sensitivity of seasonal weather and climate to two key surface boundary conditions: 1) Arctic sea-ice, and 2) North Atlantic SSTs. I am working closely with Mat Collins and James Screen, as well as collaborators from the Met Office.

Past work

My PhD (supervised by Hugo Lambert) attempted to understand changes in Northern Hemisphere land precipitation. Building on the tropospheric energy budget constraint on global mean precipitation, I showed that model-simulated historical changes in Northern Hemisphere mid-latitude land precipitation display a predictable response to aerosol forcing in the mid-twentieth century. However, this aerosol response is not evident in key mid-latitude precipitation observations (Osborne and Lambert, 2014). I also showed that observed runoff changes, derived from river discharge measurements, contrast with observed precipitation changes in this region (Osborne et al., 2015). This contrast is a consequence of an obvious breakpoint in the runoff-precipitation relationship.

Immediately after my PhD I worked briefly as an Associate Research Fellow with the Met Office on the Climate Science for Service Partnership: China. This project used the Budyko framework to demonstrate that biases in model climatology (notably precipitation) can lead to large errors in projected land surface hydrological changes in China. By correcting for these biases (using observational constraints) more robust hydrological projections can be made. A paper on this work is in preparation.

Research interests

Large scale climate variability and change
Land surface hydrological change
Impacts of sea-ice/ocean variability on seasonal weather/climate