Alex Gossart
Research Fellow VUW
Research Interests
- Surface mas balance processes and changes over the Antarctic ice sheet
- Air-ocean-sea ice interactions in the Ross Sea and Terra Novay Bay - polynya processes
- Past changes and future state of the Ross Sea
Education
-
PhD, 2019
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium)
-
MSc, 2015
Université Libre de Bruxelles
-
BSc, 2013
Université Libre de Bruxelles
Alex is a regional climate modeller at the National Modelling Hub since 2020. She uses the Polar version of the Weather Research & Forecasting Model (P-WRF) to understand processes and interactions between the atmosphere and the surface if the Antarctic Ice Sheet, which includes surface mass balance components such as surface melt, precipitation events, blowing snow, etc. She also supervises a PhD student studying air temperature-surface melt relations and empirical parametization.
Recently, together with Alena Malyarenko, Alex has coupled the atmosphere PWRF model to the ocean MITgcm model (that includes sea ice). Alena and her use this tool to study air-ocean and sea ice interactions over the Ross Sea domain. The coupled P-SKRIPS model is able to accurately simulate polynyas and sea ice extent for the present day. Their future projects include exploring the sensitivity of the climate of the Ross Sea to warmer conditions (in the frame of the ASP projects goals) and to various paleo-settings (past climate and past ice sheet configuration) with their PhD student.
Find out more about Alex's projects here:
