Overview

I am an Associate Professor in climate science in the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia. My primary research interests involve studying the physical interactions between the ocean and atmosphere and how this influences climate variability and change, with a particular focus on tropical weather systems and Antarctic oceanography.

Recent Research projects:

FORWARDS (Forecasting high-impact Weather And extreme Rainfall Drivers and Dynamics in Southeast Asia) 2024-2027. Co-I. Part of the Met Office WCSSP South East Asia programme, which aims to improve forecasting of high impact weather in Malaysia, Indonesia and the Phillipines. Within this we are simulating the effects of convectively-coupled Kelvin waves on extreme rainfall in the Maritime Continent. 

FORSEA (Forecasting in SouthEast Asia). 2019-2024. Co-I. FORSEA and its follow-on projects were funded via the Met Office, with scientists from University of Leeds, UEA and University of Reading. It delivered process-based evaluation of state-of-the-art high resolution forecasts over southeast Asia, to improve our understanding of weather processes in this region and to feed into improvements in model development and more accurate forecasts.

STIMULATE (Simulating teleconnections to the Indian monsoon: Understanding the large-scale atmospheric tropical environment). 2019-2021. UEA PI. STIMULATE was a Met-Office funded project joint with scientists from Reading and Leeds, and aimed to better understand teleconnections from tropical modes of variability to the Indian Monsoon and the biases in representing these in Met Office climate models. 

BoBBLE (Bay of Bengal Boundary Layer Experiment): From 2016-2017 I was a senior research associate on the joint UK-India BoBBLE project funded by NERC & MoES, at the University of East Anglia. On appointment as Lecturer I became an unofficial Co-I. 

My PhD was on the dynamic ocean response to the Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO), during which I demonstrated a novel feedback mechanism through which ocean Rossby waves could initiate or amplify MJO events. 

Apply for a PhD

I currently do not have funded PhD studentships available, please check again later in the year. 

I welcome enquiries from students with alternative sources of funding who are considering a PhD in tropical climate dynamics, physical oceanography, air-sea interaction or any of my other areas of interest.

Ocean and atmospheric dynamics

Air-sea interaction

Tropical climate dynamics

Extreme weather

Ocean-ice interaction

Climate variability

Climate change

Ice shelf melting and sea level rise

Global teleconnections

Selected Publications

• Meng S, Webber BGM, Stevens DP, Joshi MM, Palmieri J, Yool A. 2024. Diverse responses of upper ocean temperatures to Chlorophyll-induced solar absorption across different coastal upwelling regions. Geophys. Res. Lett. 10.1029/2024GL109714

• Vijith V, Vinayachandran PN, Webber BGM et al. 2020. Closing the sea surface mixed layer temperature budget from in situ observations alone: Operation Advection during BoBBLE. Sci. Rep. doi: 10.1038/s41598-020-63320-0.

• Webber BGM, Heywood KJ, Stevens DP, Dutrieux P, Abrahamsen EP, Jenkins A, Jacobs SS, Ha HK,Lee SH, Kim TW (2017) ­­­Mechanisms driving variability in the ocean forcing of Pine Island Glacier, Nature Communications, 8, 14507. https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms14507

• Webber, BGM, Matthews, AJ and Heywood, KJ (2010) A dynamical ocean feedback mechanism for the Madden-Julian Oscillation. Quart. J. Roy. Meteorol. Soc. 136: 740--754. https://doi.org/10.1002/qj.604