CfAI researcher, Ollie Farley, has been awarded funding from ARIA: Forecasting Tipping Points. Backed by £81m, this programme aims to enhance our climate change response by developing an early warning system for tipping points.
His project, OTTER: Exploiting Optical Turbulence as Part of a Climate Tipping Point Early Warning System, aims to develop a new instrument which will employ a low SWaP-C drone-based laser transmitter and ground-based receiver unit to measure path-resolved properties of turbulence in the atmospheric boundary layer.
This turbulence is associated with surface to atmosphere heat fluxes that are crucial to the accurate modelling of ice sheet melt rates and subsurface ocean currents. Using OTTER, the team will look to unlock a step-change in our understanding of this turbulent environment, and greatly improve both the quality and quantity of data available to model climate tipping points.
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