Iran - The DEGREES Initiative

Extreme weather events and drought in the MENA region under SRM

Project summary

The team co-led by Dr Karami and Dr Abolfazl Rezaei is researching how SRM could impact the Middle East and North Africa’s (MENA) future climate. The arid region has limited water availability and a growing population, and it is highly vulnerable to changes in storm tracks or extreme weather events such as dust storms. The project builds on the team’s pioneering work that explored how climatic parameters of the region could significantly change under global warming and some SRM scenarios.

The team

Dr Khalil Karami (PI)

University of Leipzig, Germany

Dr Khalil Karami completed his PhD at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany where his main focus was on the middle atmospheric physics and dynamics and the top-down coupling of the middle atmosphere to the troposphere. He is currently a research fellow at the University of Leipzig. He is particularly interested in the role of atmospheric waves – from their generation to their propagation and their breaking – in the large-scale dynamics and circulation of the atmosphere.

Abolfazl Rezaei (Co-PI)

Department of Earth Sciences, IASBS

Abolfazl Rezaei is an Assistant Professor in the Earth Sciences department at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Basic Sciences (IASBS) where he has been a faculty member since 2015. Abolfazl completed his M.S. and Ph.D. in hydrogeology at Shiraz University and his undergraduate studies in geology at Tehran University, Iran. His research interests lie in the area of water resources and hydrogeology, ranging from studying karst and alluvial groundwater systems to large-scale ocean-atmosphere circulations impact on water resources variability. He has collaborated actively with researchers in several other disciplines of earth-related sciences, particularly applied geophysics and geodesy, and recently climatology.

Morteza Babaei

Institute of Geophysics, University of Tehran

Morteza Babaei completed his Master in Meteorology at the Institute of Geophysics, University of Tehran. His research focuses on the impact of orography on atmospheric circulation. He is currently working as a researcher at the University of Tehran, where he is studying the impact of the Tibetan Plateau on the intertropical convergence zone.

Seyed Vahid Mousavi

Center for Research in Climate Change and Global Warming, IASBS

Vahid Mousavi received his MSc in Physics from the Institute for Advanced Studies in Basic Sciences, Zanjan, Iran. He is currently working as a Researcher at the Center for Research on Climate Change and Global Warming (CRCC), where he is studying the variability of the regional climate in the Middle East by using regional climate models. In addition, he is also conducting research on the variability of storm-tracks.