Tropical Climate course and research in order to increase subject expertise in connection with a Bangladesh climate research poject

Bjerknes Center for Climate Research (BCCR), Bergen, Norway has been awarded a prestigious project in cooperating with the Bangladesh Centre for Advanced Studies (BCAS), Dhaka. The title of the whole project is: Institutional support and capacity building for the study of, and adaption to, climate change in Bangladesh. The main aim of the project is to improve the institutional capacities in the areas of understanding and modelling future changes in monsoon variability, and the impacts of these changes fo r Bangladesh. My role is to carry out the scientific research and partake in several capacity building exercises including courses, which BCCR will be holding in 2011, both in Thailand and Norway. A project such as this demands a high level of expertise within the subject of tropical meteorology, climate, and more specifically the South Asian Monsoon. Such knowledge is not widespread in Norway. The Department of Meteorology at the University of Hawai'i (UH) has a superb reputation within tropical meteoro logy and I plan to take one graduate course in Tropical Weather and Climate. Two thirds of the Spring 2011 semester will entail research in cooperation with Professor Pao-Shin Chu and Bin Wang, who has published books on the Asian Monsoon and is world-ren owned within this field. Important statistical methods, which have been developed by the UH, will be applied to observations and the downscaled atmospheric model simulations. I attended UH in 2005 as part of my Masters degree, so the proposed exchange wil l give me the oppurtunity to further develop my network within the tropical meteorology community. This will be very beneficial for BCCR and BCAS, as we are already planning to invite UH professors to future workshops in Norway. However, the main reason f or the present application is to make it financially possible to attend UH and to learn from and work directly with the experts in tropical and monsoon meteorology at UH.