Keble Fellow at Buckingham Palace in recognition of exploration

Professor Richard Washington had the opportunity to talk to the Queen and several members of the Royal Family about his Saharan research project at a special Buckingham Palace reception on Exploration on 8 December 2011. Richard is Principal Investigator of the NERC consortium grant 'Fennec-The Saharan Climate System' which features a large observational component in the remote central Sahara. In June 2011, the first comprehensive observations were retrieved from an array of instrumentation on the Mali-Algeria border, including  lidar, sodar, radiosondes, photomoters, flux-towers and several nephelometers. These were matched by about 150 hours of flying in the UK's specially instrumented BAe-146 aircraft (photo). The UK is probably the only country in the world that has the capacity for low level (150 feet!) research flights over the core of the Sahara. One of the goals of the project is to diagnose errors in weather forecast and climate models over the region because this hot and dusty part of the world is difficult to deal with in climate models and errors in the model over the region then make for poor model performance over the rest of the world.

Image: Richard Washington (right) and research colleague (left) in front of the BAe-146 aircraft