Andrew Orr

Climate change and variability in polar and high-mountain regions.

Research Area

My research interest is on climate change and variability in polar and high-mountain regions, especially Antarctica, Himalayas, Andes, and Alps. These regions are highly sensitive, acting as indicators and magnifiers of global climate variability. This includes research into the physical and dynamical processes driving change. I often use regional and global climate models for my research, and most recently machine-learning methods. I like to work collaboratively with other scientists both in the UK and internationally. I focus on high-impact inter-disciplinary globally important problems, such as better understanding of:

1. atmosphere-ice-ocean interactions in the polar regions, which is key to understanding global sea-level changes, 
2. the hydroclimate and meteorology of mountain regions, which presents a formidable water-resource problem for the billions of people on the planet who rely on water originating from these regions, 
3. extreme weather events in polar and high-mountain regions, which despite being very high impact are poorly understood.

Project Interests

I have a broad range of long-standing interests related to climate change and variability and process-based understanding in polar and high-mountain regions and would be interested in co-developing a wide variety of projects around this.  Methods could involve using atmospheric models, observations, and machine-learning. I am also interested in multidisciplinary studentships projects. I am becoming increasingly interested in developing machine-learning based climate emulators, to explore km-scale projections of the regions that I am interested in.  Also, the occurrence of rain over Antarctica and high-mountain areas, which is extremely poorly understood, and likely to become more of an issue as global heating intensifies.