Andrew Williams

AS Atmospheric Sciences

The 2022 Outstanding Student and PhD candidate Presentation (OSPP) Award is awarded to Andrew Williams for the poster/PICO entitled:

Strong control of effective radiative forcing and precipitation by the spatial pattern of absorbing aerosol (Williams, A.; Stier, P.; Dagan, G.; Watson-Parris, D.)

Andrew Williams is a PhD student in the Department of Atmospheric, Oceanic and Planetary Physics at the University of Oxford, UK. Prior to this, he gained a Master’s degree in Physics from the University of Oxford. His research revolves around understanding the response of clouds and the atmospheric circulation to external forcing, and the implications of this for climate change.

In his EGU presentation, he used idealized climate model experiments to demonstrate a robust ‘location-dependence’ of global-mean effective radiative forcing on the geographical location of ‘sunlight-absorbing’ aerosol burdens, such as dust or black carbon. His work explains how this location-dependence arises because of the different ways the atmospheric circulation responds to the heating perturbation from the aerosol, and how this feeds back on local cloudiness.