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It is said that when the sun shines while it rains, it will rain the same time again the next day. Mary-Jane Kgatuke, a research scientist at the Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC), managed by the CSIR, may have her own ideas about whether this urban holds water.
The CHPC is funded by the Department of Science Technology and its aim is to promote computational research through the provision of high performance computing facilities and expertise for research in South Africa.
Kgatuke is a meteorologist whose focus is on limited area modelling. Meteorology is the interdisciplinary scientific study of the atmosphere that focuses on weather processes and forecasting.
Kgatuke is also a PhD student at the University of Pretoria. She is the recipient of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) Research Award for Young Scientists for her co-authored work on the internal variability of a regional climate model over South Africa, published in the International Journal of Climatology. She is the first South African to receive the prestigious WMO award.
She says the weather and climate influence our day-to-day life enormously and the effects are mostly felt in the form of extreme events. These extreme weather events include hailstorms, tropical cyclones, floods and tornadoes. The nature and severity of these vary in time and space and so do their effects.
She says forecasting is important because it tells the community what to expect and this is made possible by the availability of dynamical models.
“There is considerable evidence that dynamic models are reliable enough to provide useful predictions for time scales ranging from a few hours ahead through to decades - with differing performances for each time scale.”
Her job is to run the models for subscribers to the CHPC. .But they require extensive computational resources, especially given the uncertainty in the atmosphere that makes it necessary for multiple realisations to be made for a particular forecast.
In their endeavours to produce climate simulations, which are important for our understanding of our climate and predictions on it, the South African climate modellers have reaped the rewards of the availability of the country’s high performance computing facilities in Cape Town.
“We are now able to get our simulations through quicker and to also run models that we could not run previously due to a lack of efficient computational resources,” she says.
These high performance computers have also helped with telecommunications as they enable researchers to virtually exchange data and information.
Kgatuke says she fell in love with climatology in high school while in matric. “It was the chapter on climatology in the geography class that fascinated me. For the first time I could understand what was happening in the clouds and why the weather changed,” she says.
But it was not until her mother brought her a pamphlet from the South African Weather Services that she could imagine herself as a professional meteorologist.
“The pamphlet opened my eyes to the fact that I could go to a university and study what I loved,” she says.
In 1999 her love for geography and marks for physical science and mathematics landed her a space at the University of Pretoria. There she studied towards her BSc Meteorology. Three years later she took on her honours in Meteorology.
“Although I had a three year interval between my studies, I opted to continue in the end,” says Kgatuke, who was recently elected into the executive council of the South African Society for Atmospheric Sciences as a secretary.
Her doctoral thesis focuses on numerical weather prediction and is titled 'Development of a scheme for the numerical simulation of moist convection in the nonhydrostatic sigma coordinate model'.
In this study Kgatuke will add moisture terms to the momentum and thermodynamic energy equations, and will use these together with the water continuity equation for the simulation of clouds and precipitation for high resolution simulations. For low resolution simulations, a suitable cumulus scheme will be identified and coded in the model. She is studying under Dr Francois Engelbrecht and plans to run the model on the high performance computing facilities at the CHPC.
CSIR Communication:
Kamogelo Seekoei, email: Kamogelo Seekoei
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