How Tree Rings Can Help Small Islands Fight Climate Change!
鶹madou Civil & Environmental Engineering Researcher Profile: Dr Salman Sharifazari
Published on the 11 June 2025
Research Associate at 鶹madou's Water Research Laboratory, Dr Salman Sharifazari's PhD project aimed to improve understanding of the impact of climate change on water resources for small oceanic islands in the Indian Ocean. He used tree-ring data to understand the climate of the past and obtain the full range of climate variability, especially for rainfall recharge.
Why did you decide to do a PhD?
When I was a child, I would swim in a great lake near my hometown in Iran. Today, that lake is completely dry. It saddens me to see this occur in my lifetime. This lived experience of water insecurity is what drove me to better understand the relationship between development, water resources, and climate and how it affects water security.
Prior to my PhD, I spent10years working in academic and industry roles related to water resources management in my home country. I witnessed deep challenges in water management, including as an engineer on major irrigation projects. So, I started my PhD wanting to know how we could improve water resource management practicesthrough methodologies that that blend knowledge from various domains.
What was the contribution of your PhD?
I developed and applied methods for reconstructing climate data from before the establishment of modern instrumental records in late 19thcentury. Going deeper into the past is important to comprehend the full scale of climate variability. For example, there are climate patterns that are multi-decadal and therefore require centuries-long climate data to discern. Improving our understanding of the range of climate variability beyond our short, modern instrumental records is essential to achieving our societal goal of sustainably managing water resources, particularly under climate change.
My PhD contributed to this by drawing on environmental archives (specifically tree rings), to go back deeper in time than our modern climate monitoring instruments can. Specifically, I reconstructed hundreds of years of climate records for Rottnest Island and Christmas Island in Australia, and theDezRiver in Iran.
I also proposed a technique to bridge the gap between the coarser resolution climate data derived from environmental archives with the finer timescale modern instrumental records employed for operational purposes. I did this for groundwater modelling and applied it to islands in the Indian Ocean. The value of my technique is that it gives water resource decision makers a greater number of feasible scenarios to conduct scenario analysis.
Where will your research go from here?
There are other things I wish I had time to do in my PhD. One was to incorporate these pre-modern (called “paleo”) climate records with existing climate models to reduce the uncertainty of future climate projections. This way our future projections of rainfall and water availability would be more reliable, and we could be more confident in our decisions and actions to improve water security.
Congratulations to Dr. on completing your PhD at !
Supervision: A/Prof. Martin Andersen, A/Prof. , Dr. , Prof. Special thanks also to: Prof. , Prof.