About me

Hi! I am Jackson Tan, a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Mathematical Sciences and part of the Monash Weather and Climate research group at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, pursuing my research in the field of climate science. I am also affiliated with the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science, a cross-institutional collaboration in Australia for climate science.

The field of my research is in atmospheric science, and my focus is on the large-scale organisation of tropical convection under the supervision of Christian Jakob (Monash University) and Todd P. Lane (University of Melbourne). Tropical convection is a critical process in the climate system, but it cannot be resolved in a global-scale climate model. Parametrisation schemes are therefore employed to model the sub-grid scale behaviour of convective clouds through resolved large-scale variables. However, most schemes ignore information from neighbouring grid boxes and previous time steps, assuming instead that the coherence in convection can be achieved through the large-scale environment that drives it. This 'diagnostic' approach in convective parametrisation may be a factor in the poor performance of models with respect to precipitation and tropical variability.

My project studies the large-scale properties of tropical convection and how it organises beyond the scale of a grid box in a typical global climate model. This is achieved through the use of cloud regimes, an objective classification of global cloud distributions as measured from a satellite network, which reveal the convective nature of the environment in the grid box. Click on the link in the left sidebar or visit this page for more details on this product. I hope that my results will advance our understanding in the nature of the organisation of tropical convection and its relation to the large-scale state, and address the consequence of the diagnostic assumption used in convective parametrisation.

My background is in physics, with a B.Sc. (Hon.) in Physics from the National University of Singapore, before taking up a M.Sc. in Earth Physics from the Australian National University with a project on oceanography. From thence, I migrated my focus to the atmosphere in my current Ph.D. candidature.

For more information about me, click on the links in the navigation bar at the top or to the left.