22nd June 2021
Net Zero
Speakers
Professor Keith P Shine
Regius Professor of Meteorology and Climate Science, University of Reading
Keith Shine is Regius Professor of Meteorology and Climate Science at the University of Reading, where he has worked since 1988 (including spells as Head of Department). He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society, the UK’s science academy, in 2009 and was awarded the Royal Meteorological Society’s Mason Gold Medal in 2019. His research and teaching are broadly in the area of the role of radiative processes in climate and climate change. This work has included extensive interaction with laboratory spectroscopists and metrologists, the development of metrics for comparing the climate impacts of emissions of different greenhouse gases, and the two-way relationship between aviation and climate change.
Myles Allen
Professor of Geosystem Science, Environmental Change Institute and Dept of Physics, University of Oxford; Director, Oxford Net Zero
Recently described as "the physicist behind net zero," Myles Allen developed the methods used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2001 to quantify the size of human influence on observed and projected changes in global temperature. He founded the climateprediction.net project, enabling members of the public to volunteer computing resources to run the world's largest climate modelling experiments, and in 2003 he proposed how probabilities could be used to assign responsibility for individual extreme weather events. In 2010 he was awarded the Appleton Medal and Prize from the Institute of Physics "for his important contributions to the detection and attribution of human influence on climate and quantifying uncertainty in climate predictions." At a conference in 2005, Allen first proposed the concept of a global carbon budget: the idea that peak warming is determined by the total amount of carbon dioxide we emit into the atmosphere before emissions are reduced to net zero, not the amount we emit in any given year or the eventual long-term atmospheric concentration. He has been working on the implications for climate policy ever since, most recently as coordinating lead author for the 2018 IPCC Special Report on 1.5 degrees, and has long been a proponent of fossil fuel producers taking responsibility for cleaning up after the products they sell, rather than placing the onus on relatively powerless consumers: https://go.ted.com/mylesallen. He is a Professor of Geosystem Science in the School of Geography and the Environment and the Department of Physics, University of Oxford, a Fellow of Linacre College and Director of the Oxford Net Zero Initiative.
Dr Sarah Honour
Head of Science and Innovation Strategy and ODA, Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy (BEIS)
Sarah has worked for the UK government for over 15 years on a range of science issues from air quality and ecosystem services through to using research and international partnerships to tackle global development challenges. She has represented the UK in a range of international science fora including the G7, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
In her current role, she is responsible for scientific advice to support the road to UK net zero and global climate action. This includes: i) development and delivery of the UK’s Greenhouse Gas Emissions Inventory, to track progress in meeting climate targets; ii) leadership of the UK’s engagement on international climate science including the IPCC and; iii) management of a programme of climate science research and services, including the Met Office Hadley Centre Climate Programme.
Room One - Climate
Dr Dan Hodson
Research Scientist, NCAS, University of Reading
I'm an NCAS Research Scientist working within the Department of Meteorology at the University of Reading. I'm interested in how the Atlantic Ocean affects weather and climate, and particularly how the Atlantic ocean drives long, decadal timescale changes in climate, and whether an improved understanding of these processes will allow us to predict some aspects of climate years, or decades in advance.
Dr Nicola Warwick
NCAS Research Scientist, NCAS, University of Cambridge
Dr Nicola Warwick is an NCAS scientist at the University of Cambridge. Her research focuses on using atmospheric modelling to determine emissions and sinks of gases important for both climate and air quality. Her main interests are in methane, stable methane isotopes and hydrogen.
Dr Daniel Befort
Postdoctoral Research Assistant, Atmospheric, Oceanic and Planetary Physics, Department of Physics, University of Oxford
Daniel received his PhD in meteorology at Free University of Berlin on the topic of the variability of the Indian summer monsoon during the past 6000 years. In 2014, he moved to the University of Birmingham to work on the observed variability and predictability of extra-tropical cyclones as well as on the ability of climate models to represent East Asian rainfall characteristics. Four years later, he started at the University of Oxford working on the EU Horizon 2020 EUCP project which aims to develop a climate prediction system for Europe by combining information from different sources including decadal prediction and climate projections.
Fiona O’Connor
Scientific Manager, Met Office Hadley Centre
Fiona O’Connor leads a team at the Met Office Hadley Centre (MOHC), investigating the role of atmospheric composition and Earth System interactions in climate and the impact of climate change on atmospheric composition. She has co-authored over 80 papers, contributed to 3 books, and is an editor for the journal Geoscientific Model Development. She led the UK contribution to the Aerosol and Chemistry Model Intercomparion Project (AerChemMIP), an international activity aimed at quantifying the climate and air quality impacts of composition ahead of the IPCC 6th assessment report. She is also currently co-leading an international working group on ozone radiative forcing for Phase II of the Tropospheric Ozone Assessment Report (TOAR-II).
Room Two - Air Quality and Composition
James Lee
Research Professor, NCAS
Professor James Lee is an NCAS research scientist based in the Wolfson Atmospheric Chemistry Laboratories at the University of York. He specialises in measurements of air pollutants including techniques for directly measuring emissions, as well as investigating chemical processes of gas phase compounds that lead to the formation of secondary pollutants such as ozone. He has played a leading role in recent ground based field campaigns in London, Beijing and Delhi and also leads research using the large UK research aircraft.
Helen Dacre
Professor of Meteorology, University of Reading
Helen Dacre is a Professor of Meteorology at the University of Reading. Her research interests include the dynamics of synoptic scale weather systems and their role in the transport of moisture and particulates in the atmosphere.
James Allan
NCAS Scientist, NCAS, University of Manchester
James Allan is a research scientist at NCAS and has the position of Reader at the University of Manchester. He specialises in the in situ measurements of atmospheric aerosols, particularly with online equipment such as aerosol mass spectrometers and single particle soot photometers, with applications including the effects of aerosols on air quality and climate change. He was awarded his PhD in 2004 at UMIST and in 2013 received the prestigious Smoluchowski award at the European Aerosol Conference. He is a member of the Air Quality Expert Group (AQEG) at the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA).
Judith Jeffery
Lidar and Meteorological Instruments Scientist, STFC/NCAS
Judith Jeffery has 20 years’ experience of working in atmospheric science and measurements at Chilbolton Observatory and has participated in several COST actions on atmospheric profiling measurements. She constructed much of the existing Raman lidar system at the observatory and is responsible for all aspects of operating the system. She also acts as instrument scientist for the Halo Doppler lidar, CL51 ceilometer and many meteorological instruments at the site. In recent years she has contributed to a project on remote sensing of surface air pressure using radar.
Room Three - Weather
Prof Brian Golding
Fellow in Weather Impacts, Met Office
Professor Brian Golding is a Fellow in Weather Impacts at the Met Office, visiting professor at Bristol University and co-chair of the World Meteorological Organisation’s 10-year High Impact Weather project (HIWeather). His first degree in Mathematics at Leeds University was followed by a PhD at Reading University in the study of baroclinic instability in dry and moist atmospheres. In a 48-year career at the Met Office, Brian’s research has spanned numerical modelling, data assimilation, nowcasting, flood and ocean wave prediction, interactive forecaster graphics, and weather impacts in aviation, defence, road maintenance and health amongst others. From 1990-1992 he was on sabbatical at the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, applying mesoscale NWP to Australian weather systems. From 2005-2012 he was Deputy Director of Weather Science at the Met Office. Following his retirement from this role, he was awarded the OBE for services to weather forecasting and the prediction of hazardous weather.
Dr Abdullah Kahraman
Research Associate, Newcastle University
Abdullah Kahraman is an atmospheric scientist focused on severe convective weather, currently investigating how thunderstorms, lightning, hail, and extreme precipitation across Europe might respond to anthropogenic climate change, using kilometre-scale simulations in particular. He is affiliated with Newcastle University, but based in Met Office Hadley Centre in Exeter. He has worked as an operational meteorologist for almost two decades in his early career, published Turkish severe weather climatologies, and taught synoptic meteorology, mesoscale meteorology, severe weather forecasting, aviation meteorology, satellite and radar meteorology as an assistant professor of meteorology in Turkey before moving to the UK.
Swinda Falkena
PhD Candidate, University of Reading
Swinda Falkena is a PhD Candidate within the Mathematics of Planet Earth Centre for Doctoral Training at the University of Reading, working under the primary supervision of Prof Ted Shepherd. Her research focusses on atmospheric circulation regimes and their dynamics. She has used regularized clustering methods for a robust identification of regimes and is interested in regimes as a mediator between the slow drivers of climate variability and regional weather. She holds an MSc in Mathematics and Climate Physics from Utrecht University, where she worked under the supervision of Prof Henk Dijkstra and Prof Jason Frank on the justification of delay equation climate models.
Paula LM Gonzalez
Research Scientist, NCAS and Adjunct Research Scientist at IRI, Earth Institute, Columbia University, USA
Paula Gonzalez is a research scientist at NCAS. Her research interests cover climate variability, predictability and change. She is particularly interested in studies that use model output to understand the dynamical mechanisms that control climate processes on different timescales. She has also worked on different research projects, both in the UK and in the USA that explore the use of climate information for applications in different sectors, such as agriculture and energy.