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Caroline Wainwright

Dr Caroline Wainwright

Lecturer in Climate Change

School of Earth and Environmental Sciences

Email
WainwrightC2@cardiff.ac.uk
Campuses
Main Building, Room Room 2.49, Park Place, Cardiff, CF10 3AT
Users
Available for postgraduate supervision

Overview

My research is around climate variability and change over Africa. In particular I'm very interesting in exploring variability and changes in the seasonal cycle of rainfall over Africa, including recent trends, current variability, and future projected changes. I've worked on methodologies for characterising the seasonal cycle of precipitation across Africa and the tropics, and used these methodologies for a range of applications. 

Recently, I've also started working more in areas relating to the impacts of climate variability over Africa, particularly working in the areas of renewable energy generation and health. I'm currently involved with a project looking at the impact of climate on migration in Madagascar.

I'm very interested in how forecasts and warnings can enhance preparedness across Africa.

For more details on this, please see this interview from my previous role.

Publication

2023

2022

2021

2020

2019

2018

2017

2016

2015

2014

Articles

Research

My research is around climate variability and change over Africa. In particular I'm very interesting in exploring variability and changes in the seasonal cycle of rainfall over Africa, including recent trends, current variability, and future projected changes. I've worked on methodologies for characterising the seasonal cycle of precipitation across Africa and the tropics, and used these methodologies for a range of applications. 

During my PhD I developed a new methodology for analysing African wet seasons by characterising the rainfall regime and identifying the wet season’s onset and cessation dates (Dunning et al., 2016).  You can read more about the methodology in this blog article.

This was used to assess both recent variability and future projections of changing seasonality across Africa (Dunning et al., 2018) and to assess climate model representation of the seasonal cycle. This blog article discusses the work on future projections. Idealised simulations were also performed to explore model errors in the representation of the seasonal cycle over southern West Africa. The code to calculate onset and cessation dates is available on Github.

My work then naturally progressed onto research linking the recent decline in the East African long rains to changing seasonal timing (Wainwright et al., 2019, blog article), and research determining patterns of changing precipitation seasonality in convection-permitting models (Wainwright et al., 2021). This work was completed as part of the HyCRISTAL Project. 

Additionally, I have further developed the methodology for determining onset and cessation to classify wet and dry seasons throughout the tropics, in order to explore changes in rainfall extremes in wet and dry seasons separately across the tropics. Future climate projections were found to show greater increases in the length of dry spells and larger temperature increases in the dry seasons than in the wet seasons (Wainwright et al., 2021). This contributed to a project with a major UK confectioner looking at changing climatic suitability for cocoa cultivation under future climate change. Meeting regularly with representatives from the confectioner informed us that more extreme dry seasons may be challenging for cocoa, which is a perennial crop, thus these findings on longer dry spells during dry seasons were particularly important and commercially relevant. 

At present, I'm exploring the dry season to wet season transitions over East Africa, in particular, the drivers that lead to rainfall events at the end of the dry season, that mark the transition to the wet season. 

Recently, I've also started working more in areas relating to the impacts of climate variability over Africa, particularly working in the areas of renewable energy generation and health. I'm currently involved with a project looking at the impact of climate on migration in Madagascar.

I also worked on the African SWIFT project, investigating sub-seasonal to seasonal forecasting over tropical Africa. Part of this involved working with agriculturalists in Ghana to produce sub-seasonal forecast products for agricultural planning (Hirons et al., 2023). I am increasingly working in early warning and preparedness, and spoke about this at a COP27 side event. 

Teaching

I teach on a range of modules and field trips on topics around atmospheric processes and climate change. At present I am teaching on the following modules. 

  • The Ocean-Atmosphere System 
  • Climate Change, Adaptation and Resilience
  • Kos Fieldtrip
  • Data Exploration Grand Challenge 

Biography

2023 - : Lecturer at Cardiff University

2022: Research Fellowship at the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and Environment, Imperial College, London

2018-2021: Post-Doctoral Researcher at the University of Reading

Research themes

Specialisms

  • Tropical meteorology
  • Climate change science
  • Climate change impacts and adaptation
  • Weather Forecasting

External profiles