Professor Peter Jan van Leeuwen awarded prestigious research grant by the European Research Council

Thursday, 14 April 2016

Professor Peter Jan van Leeuwen of the Meteorology Department has been awarded a prestigious research grant by the European Research Council (ERC).

The ERC Advanced Grants are designed to allow outstanding research leaders to pursue ground-breaking, high-risk projects in Europe.

Professor van Leeuwen’s research proposal focuses on understanding the complex geophysical systems that affect global weather patterns, and was among nearly 2000 proposals submitted to the ERC.

In congratulating Professor van Leeuwen, ERC President Jean-Pierre Bourguignon said: "I am confident that this grant will help you to develop your research at the highest possible level, and to achieve ground–breaking results in the true spirit of the ERC."

Professor van Leeuwen said: “I am very grateful for the trust expressed by the European Research Council in the science that I proposed. Understanding the relationship between cause and effect in complex systems is important to all sciences. The grant will help me research this and apply the knowledge in an area of science that is so close to my heart”.

Scientists use several methods to infer non-linear causal relations, but these can often lead to different answers. Professor van Leeuwen proposes to embed causality into a Bayesian framework, moving from testing causality to estimating causality strength and its uncertainty in a systematic way. By incorporating different methods and new knowledge into this framework, he hopes to have a more robust mechanism to understand the causal relationship.

Professor van Leeuwen aims to test the new framework on simple models and then apply them to a high-resolution model of the ocean area around South Africa where the Southern Ocean, the Indian Ocean, and the Atlantic Ocean meet. This area plays a crucial role in the global circulation of heat and salt by bringing warm and salty Indian Ocean water into the Atlantic in a highly turbulent manner. Using advanced data assimilation he will first generate a long model evolution run that resembles nature as closely as possible, and then analyse that run with the new framework for causal relations. This will improve our understanding of what sets this interocean transport, the turbulent local dynamics or the global climate-related dynamics – which is crucial to understanding the functioning of the ocean in the climate system.