Dr Callum Munday

Callum is a climate scientist with a focus on African climate and climate change. He is interested in how we can combine observational and modelling approaches to constrain the future evolution of African climate. He currently is a postdoctoral scientist on the REACH water security programme.

Callum's completed his DPhil at Oxford in 2019 as part of the NERC Environmental Research DTP. His project investigated the plausibility of climate model projections of southern African rainfall. As part of this research, he considered how we can make the most out of models to generate and test hypothesis about how regional climate systems function. The DPhil project contributed to the NERC-funded Future Climate for Africa (FCFA) UMFULA project. During his DPhil, he also took an interest in the climate controls on dust emission, contributing to the field-component of the CLARIFY project in Namibia.

Alongside his research, Callum is a college lecturer in Physical Geography at St Edmund Hall (2018-2021), having previously taught at Keble College (2017-18). He teaches broadly across the undergraduate Physical Geography course, including supervision of dissertations. In the department, he lectures on the African climate and climate change and is the research representative for the Climate Research Cluster.

Callum's current research focusses on the dynamics of African low-level jets (fast winds in the lower atmosphere). He is particularly interested in how the variability in the jets, and water vapour transport, influence African rainfall. Recently, he led a field campaign to northwest Kenya (Radiosonde Investigation for the Turkana Jet - RIFTJET) to measure one of these jets - the Turkana Jet - for the first time in forty years. As part of his role as a Visiting Scientist at the UK Met Office, he is also running model experiments to isolate the role of the jets in African climate.

In October 2021, Callum joined the NERC-funded DRY-CAB project, which aims to provide the first detailed observations of rainfall onset at the southern African tropical edge region.

Research Projects

• UMFULA: Uncertainty Reduction in Models for Understanding Development Applications (NERC, 2015-2021)
• REACH - Improving Water Security for the Poor (FCDO, 2015-2024)