Sonya Fiddes

Sonya’s work aims at understanding how we can improve the modeling of Southern Ocean clouds to reduce the radiative bias.Over the Southern Ocean, global climate models have a long-standing bias where too much sunlight reaches the surface. This bias can be attributed to how clouds are modelled in the region. Clouds over the Southern Ocean are unique in that, despite freezing temperatures, they often remain as liquid. They are known as supercooled liquid water clouds. These clouds can remain liquid due to the very clean nature of the Southern Ocean.

In particular, I am interested in how aerosols (tiny solid or liquid particles) influence cloud formation and phase, especially aerosols that come from the ocean. My students and I are running and developing both the global ACCESS-AM and a modified version (to include online aerosols) of the regional ACCESS-ram3 models to acheive these scientific goals.

Sonya holds a PhD in Atmospheric Science from the University of Melbourne.