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School of Geography and the Environment

University of Oxford
School of Geography and the Environment

 School of Geography and the Environment

Dr Ana Lopez

Academic Profile

Ana Lopez has a first degree in Physics from the University of Buenos Aires (Argentina), and an MSc and PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (USA). After completing her PhD, Ana was a Glasstone Research Fellow at the Rudolf Peierls Centre for Theoretical Physics (Oxford University), and a Senior Researcher at the Instituto Balseiro (Argentina), where she undertook research in theoretical Condensed Matter Physics.

Ana worked for the School of Geography and the Environment from 2004 to 2009 as a Daphne Jackson Trust fellow on the problem of quantification of uncertainty in regional and local climate change predictions and their impacts. Since 2006 Ana has been a Tyndall research fellow working in Programme 1: Informing Climate Policy.

Current Research

Predictions of temperature and other climate variables over the next one hundred years and beyond are inherently uncertain due to a number of factors, including the incomplete knowledge about the processes that govern the Earth's climate system, natural internal variability of the climate, limitations of the computational models that are developed to simulate the system (the so-called General Circulation Models, GCMs), and fundamental unpredictability of future greenhouse-gas emissions. Therefore an exact prediction of how future climate will evolve at global and regional scales will always be impossible. However, the estimation of the uncertainties constitutes a challenge since this is the information required for developing strategies for the adaptation to and the mitigation of climate change.

The information available to produce forecasts consist of an (often incomplete) set of observed climate variables, and the corresponding data simulated by different GCMs, which in turn are plagued by uncontrolled approximations. A primary source of model uncertainty is the representation of processes that cannot be rigorously modelled, usually because they operate at sub-grid scales or are poorly understood, and are therefore represented through parameterisations. Early studies of these uncertainties occurred through "ensembles of opportunity" where GCMs developed by different research centres were compared. A more recent approach consists of large-ensemble perturbed-physics experiments, where a subset of climate model parameters is varied systematically within their physically plausible range. An example of such an ensemble is the one obtained by the climateprediction.net (cp.net). In a study using cp.net first experiment to analyse the impacts of climate change in the river flows in the SE of England, we observed that the uncertainty introduced by climate model uncertainty in the climate change impacts analysis can be quite large compared to other sources of uncertainty. Therefore, any risk management and adaptation strategy has to account for this uncertainty, and must be adaptable to climate change information that will indefectible evolve in time.

Ana is currently exploring how to use different tools to analyse these large ensembles, quantify their uncertainty, and extract robust and relevant information for the assessment of impacts of climate change in different systems, with a focus on water resource management and biodiversity.

Other areas of interest include the development of techniques to evaluate the ability of climate models to simulate the observed climate dynamics, time series analysis to study non linear dynamical systems, Bayesian modelling, multivariate analysis, sudden climate change, and risk management under uncertainty.

Selected Research Projects (since 2001)
  • None currently listed

Teaching

Ana is a college lecturer in Physics, University College. She teaches Quantum Mechanics, Thermal and Statistical Physics, and Mathematical Methods to second year Physics and Physics and Philosophy students, and Climate Physics and Fluid Dynamics to third year students.

Selected Publications

  • New. M., Lopez, A., Dessai, S., and R. Wilby (in press, 2007) Challenges in using probabilistic climate change information for impact assessments: an example from the water sector. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, A.
  • Stainforth, D.A., Downing, T.E., Washington, R., Lopez, A. and M. New (in press, 2007) Issues in the interpretation of climate model ensembles to inform decisions. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, A..
  • Lopez, A., Tebaldi, C., New, M., Stainforth, D., Allen, M. and J. Kettleborough (2006) Two approaches to quantifying uncertainty in climate change. Journal of Climate, 19: 4785.

Previous Research and Publications

A description of my research and publications previous to 2004 can be found here.