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University of Oxford
School of Geography and the Environment

 School of Geography and the Environment

Professor Richard Washington

Academic Profile

Richard Washington is Professor of Climate Science at the School of Geography and the Environment and Fellow of Keble College, Oxford. His research interests are in climate change and variability, particularly in Africa and the global tropics.

He has degrees from the University of Natal and University of Oxford and taught at the University of Natal and University of Cape Town. His doctorate was on African rainfall variability and change, which was undertaken jointly between the University of Oxford under Professor Alayne Street-Perrott and Chris Folland's group at the Hadley Centre of the UK Meteorological Office. He took up a University Lectureship position and Fellowship at Keble College in 1999, and a Readership in 2006.

Richard is Co-Chair World Climate Research Program African Climate Variability Panel (CLIVAR-VACS) 2006-2010 and served as a panel member of CLIVAR-VACS from 2003-2006. Richard leads the development of the CLIVAR Africa Climate Atlas.

He is the Lead author of DFID and Defra commissioned 'African Climate Report' for the Gleaneagles 2005 G8 and has been a contributing author to the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change chapters on Observed Climate and Africa for the 2007 and 2001 reports. He is a member of the Leadership Group tasked with the development of the Climate Change Challenge Program, a joint multi-million dollar proposal between ESSP and CGIAR entitled Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security.

Richard has recently developed assessments of current climate variability and change, including projected climate change scenarios for regions in Africa and other parts of the world for clients such as the World Bank, UK DFID, AEA (Energy and the Environment) and Oxfam.

He has served as the World Climate Research Program representative to the International Council for Science southern Africa as well as membership of several external steering committees including AFRICANNESS (African Earth System Science) and the Stockholm Environment Institute-Oxford. He was one of 12 members of the NERC Climate Science Strategy Panel for the forthcoming 2007-2012 NERC Science Strategy. Over the last 5 years he has taught on several World Climate Program "Climate Information and Prediction Services (CLIPS)" Workshops, including Nairobi, Niamey, Dar Es Salaam, Qatar and, most recently, in Tunis . He has served on the panel of judges for the Best Research Paper (SA Society for Atmospheric Scientists) from 2003-2008.

His recent research efforts and opinions have been reported in:

  • Nature, 434: p816-819 (14 Apr 2005) Bodele Dust Experiment.
  • Nature, 444: p126 (9 Nov 2006) Bodele Dust Transport to Amazon.
  • Nature, 435, p862-863 (16 June 2005) African Climate and G8.
  • Science, 313, p608-609 (4 August 2006) African Monsoon.

Richard is an associate of Climate Change Risk Management.

Current Research

Richard is engaged in research on climate change and variability in Africa and the global ocean basins. His research evaluates how mechanisms of rainfall are represented in global and regional climate models and how these mechanisms work in the real world. He investigates the role of the ocean basins in modulating climate and assessments of the ability of climate models to simulate important patterns of variability such as ENSO. This interest has extended to the preparation of climate variability and change assessments and future scenarios of African and tropical climate for a variety of government agencies and NGOs.

He has also recently focused on diagnosing the controls on mineral aerosol (dust) emission and transport from the key global sources. This work has included field experiments in the world's largest source of mineral aerosols, the Bodélé Depression Chad (BodEx field experiment) for which he was co-PI. (see article [PDF: 902KB] in Nature). He was one of the co-authors to be awarded the Environmental Research Letters Outstanding Article Award in 2007 for a paper on Bodélé dust and the Amazon basin.

Applications of this work in development problems have seen his involvement in a variety of UK Government Initiatives. In 2004 the UK government, through a joint DEFRA and DFID effort, commissioned Richard to write a report on African climate:


For further details on current research, see: http://www.geog.ox.ac.uk/~rwashing/research/.

Research Funding

Recent research funding includes:

  • Tyndall Centre for Climate Change, PI Climate Outlooks 36 month;
  • RGS Gilchrist Award PI on Bodele Dust Experiment;
  • NERC Small Grant Co-PI;
  • DFID African Climate Report; and
  • DFID Climate Risk Kenya.
Selected Research Projects (since 2001)

Teaching

Undergraduate Teaching

Richard teaches the Climatology and Earth Observation and Application in Geography courses for the Preliminary Examination.

He lectures on 'Observed Climate Change, Models and Climate Change Detection, Attribution and Prediction' as part of the Drivers of Environmental Change part of the 'The Geographical Environment: Physical' course course, and on 'The Enterprise of Climate Science' for the Philosophy, Nature, and Practice of Geography core course, in the Final Honour School. He also lectures on 'General Circulation, Modes of Climate Variability, Seasonal Prediction, and Climate Models' for the Final Honour School Special Subject course Climate Variability and Change.

Postgraduate Teaching

Professor Washington teaches the 'Arid Environmental Systems' course for the MSc Programmes.

Current graduate students include:
  • Said Al Sarmi
    The mechanisms of Oman / Arabia climate variability
  • Christopher Allen
    Atmospheric mechanisms of mineral aerosol emission and transport over the central Sahara desert
  • Ian Ashpole
    Towards a more accurate simulation of the effects of small-scale variability on large-scale dust emissions
  • Rachel James
    Implications of global mean temperature increase for African precipitation
D.Phil. students successfully completing since 2001:
  • Antony Millner (2010)
    Information, decisions, and behaviour: theoretical essays on the value of climate predictions
  • Nynke Hofstra (2009)
    Changes in daily climate and runoff trends in Europe.
  • Hang Gao (2008)
    Chinese dust storms: origins and mechanisms - a TOMS based research
  • Gillian Kay (2008)
    Mechanisms of southern African rainfall variability in coupled climate models.
  • Sebastian Engelstaedter (2007)
    An analysis of the role of the atmosphere in modulating desert dust variability: controls on emission and atmospheric transport

Selected Publications

For details on publications, see: