21st September 2021
Next Decade
Speaker Biographies
Professor Ted Shepherd FRS
Grantham Professor of Climate Science, University of Reading
Ted is a specialist in large-scale atmospheric dynamics and circulation and its role in climate change. He has held leadership roles in international scientific assessments of climate (IPCC) and stratospheric ozone (WMO/UNEP), and in the World Climate Research Programme, and until recently chaired the Science Review Group of the Met Office Hadley Centre. His recent research has focused on how to effectively and meaningfully characterize the large uncertainty in aspects of climate change related to atmospheric circulation, which is in striking contrast to the thermodynamic aspects. As part of this effort he has been pioneering a ‘storyline’ approach to representing uncertainty in physical aspects of climate change, including extreme events, and beginning to engage in inter-disciplinary collaborations.
Dr Christine Johnson
Dynamics Research Scientist, Met Office
Christine Johnson is a scientist in the Dynamics Research team at the Met Office. Her work is currently focussed on the development of tangent-linear and adjoint versions of GungHo for data assimilation, and on the development of a limited-area version of GungHo for regional weather and climate modelling.
She first joined the Met Office in 2006 to work on statistical post-processing of multi-model ensembles and regional-weather ensemble-prediction. Prior to her research appointment at the Met Office, Christine spent two years at NCAR, USA as an Advanced Study Program post-doctoral fellow, investigating the use of adaptive observations in ensemble data assimilation.
Christine completed her PhD at the University of Reading. Her thesis investigated the interaction between observations and dynamics in 4D variational data assimilation. She also has a first-class BSc degree in Mathematics and Meteorology, awarded by the University of Reading.
Dr Peter Bauer
Deputy Director, Research Department, ECMWF
Dr Peter Bauer is the Deputy Director of the Research Department at ECMWF in the UK and heads the ECMWF Scalability Programme. He obtained his PhD degree in meteorology from the University in Hamburg, Germany. During his career, he was awarded post-doctoral and research fellowships working at NOAA and NASA in the US and IPSL in France and more recently the German Helmholtz Society International Fellowship. He led a research team on satellite meteorology at DLR in Germany before joining ECMWF in 2000. He has been a member of advisory committees for national weather services, the World Meteorological Organization and European space agencies. He has coordinated several European Commission projects on high-performance computing, the recent ExtremeEarth proposal for European Flagships and ECMWF's contribution to the Green Deal initiative Destination Earth.
Dr Samantha V Adams
Data Science Research Manager, Met Office Informatics Lab
Samantha V. Adams is a Scientific Systems Manager within the UK Met Office Informatics Lab. She received the B.Sc. degree in mathematics and physics from The Open University in 2003, and the M.Res. Degree in computing and the Ph.D. degree in computational neuroscience from the University of Plymouth in 2009 and 2013, respectively. She has worked for many years as a scientific software engineer and has post-doctoral research experience in biologically inspired computing, encompassing Machine Learning and AI. Her current research interests are in unsupervised learning and generally in applying Machine Learning to weather and climate data.
Dr Ruth Purvis
Head of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion, NCAS and University of York
Ruth Purvis has a background in atmospheric chemistry, completing her PhD in 2003 from the University of Leeds. She actually started a PhD in organic modelling but 12 months in realised it was not for her and switched to atmospheric science. This decision felt really tough at the time but one of the best decisions she ever made. After a brief stint as a PDRA at the University of York she started working for the Facility for Atmospheric Airborne Measurements as the facility’s atmospheric chemist. Ruth worked there for 4 years, taking part in some great projects and travelled to some amazing places. However, she realised that she missed the science, so in 2008 returned to York as a NCAS Air Quality scientist.
After her second period of maternity leave 8 years ago, Ruth was asked to sit on the York Athena Swan Committee and this is where her interest in EDI work began. Chemistry @ York have held the Athena Swan Gold award for over 15 years and being part of the committee gave a great insight. Ruth was heavily involved in the data for the subsequent submissions.
Ruth was appointed Head of NCAS EDI one year to start NCAS on its EDI journey. One passion she has is to look at how we can encourage the under represented groups into a career in Environmental Science.
Simon Lee
Department of Meteorology, University of Reading
Having been interested in meteorology from a young age, I joined Reading in 2014 to study the integrated Master’s in Meteorology and Climate (MMet) with a year at the University of Oklahoma. For my MMet dissertation, I worked with Paul Williams and Tom Frame, investigating trends and variability in the Atlantic upper-level jet stream in reanalyses. A key finding from this work was published in Nature in 2019. In 2018 I began my PhD at Reading, working with Andrew Charlton-Perez and Steve Woolnough, and Jason Furtado at the University of Oklahoma. My research focuses on subseasonal predictability and model representation of the stratospheric polar vortex and its impacts on the tropospheric circulation with a focus on North American weather regimes. In 2020, I took up the position of Co-Editor in Chief of the RMetS Weather journal, and in 2021 I was awarded the Society’s Malcolm Walker Prize.
Prof David M. Schultz
Professor of Synoptic Meteorology, and Director, Centre for Crisis Studies and Mitigation, University of Manchester
David Schultz is Professor of Synoptic Meteorology at the University of Manchester and Director of the Centre for Crisis Studies and Mitigation, a new interdisciplinary network of natural hazard researchers. Among his many research interests are the physical processes that lead to hazardous weather events such as heavy rain, tornadoes, snowstorms, and windstorms. He has published over 180 peer-reviewed articles and since 2008 has served as the Chief Editor of Monthly Weather Review, the oldest continuously running meteorological journal in the world. He is Fellow of the American Meteorological Society and Geological Society of London, a Senior Fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy, and a winner of multiple teaching awards. He has taught thousands of students through his online course “Our Earth: Its Climate, History and Processes” on Coursera. He is also the author of Eloquent Science: A Practical Guide to Becoming a Better Writer, Speaker, and Atmospheric Scientist.
David will also be a panellist during the afternoon session, following on from his talk.
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Dr Barbara Brooks
Joint Head, Atmospheric Measurement and Observation Facility, NCAS
Barbara graduated from UMIST in 1990 with a degree in Pure and Applied Physics and moved about ½ a mile down the road to Manchester Universities’ Schuster Laboratory to undertake her Ph.D studies with the Condensed Matter and Materials group. She graduated from here in 1994 and then spent the next 8 years leaning her trade as an observational atmospheric science and technologist. In 2002 Barbara joined NCAS as an Instrument scientist and in 2013 she was appointed as Head of the Atmospheric Measurement Facility (AMF) and tasked to deliver, on behalf of NCAS, a facility supporting national and international atmospheric science. Barbara has lead AMF through commissioning as a NERC Facility and its subsequent merger with the NERC Facility for Atmospheric Radar Research (NFARR) to form AMOF: the Atmospheric Measurement and Observation Facility. She is currently joint head of this facility.
Dr Antje Inness
Senior Scientist, Copernicus Department, ECMWF
Antje Inness graduated with a degree in Meteorology from the University of Bonn and then completed a PhD in Meteorology at the University in Reading on 'Quasi-horizontal water vapour transport across the dynamical tropopause'. She has been working at ECMWF since 2000, first in the Satellite Section to monitoring and assimilate ENVISAT data and later in the EU funded GEMS and MACC projects where she set up the reactive gases data assimilation system. She is now working as Senior Scientist at ECMWF for the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS) and is involved in the data assimilation of atmospheric composition data for CAMS, the running of the CAMS reanalysis and preparation for the monitoring and assimilation of new data sets such as retrievals from TROPOMI onboard the Sentinel-5p satellite.
Prof John Remedios
Director of the National Centre of Earth Observation; Professor of Earth Observational Science, University of Leicester
John Remedios has been involved in Earth Observation (EO) research for more than thirty years and Director of NCEO since 2014. He is a physicist but has collaborated across the fields of chemistry, geography and biology in his studies of satellite data and environmental science. A favourite strand of his research has always been his study of atmosphere composition from climate gases to stratospheric ozone depletion to globally representative measurements of chemically reactive species. A particularly fruitful area has been his group’s use of spectroscopy to identify new infra-red signatures which allow 3-d measurements of composition throughout the atmosphere, such as peroxyacetyl nitrate, acetone and components of polar stratospheric clouds. John is the Principal Investigator of the UK Along Track Scanning Radiometers (ATSRs) and has worked on vertical profiling instruments on Envisat and Metop. He has also played leading roles in the development of new satellite mission concepts to study the atmosphere including specifications of requirements for the relevant Copernicus Sentinel satellites. He is currently chair of the Mission Advisory Group for the metrological, Traceable Radiometry Underpinning Terrestrial- and Helio- Studies optical mission which is under development, and is an advisor to the European Space Agency on its EO programmes.
Dr Emily Shuckburgh OBE
Director, Cambridge Zero, University of Cambridge
Emily is a climate scientist and mathematician, a Fellow of the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership, an Associate Fellow of the Centre for Science and Policy and a Fellow of the British Antarctic Survey. She leads the UKRI Centre for Doctoral Training on the Application of AI to the study of Environmental Risks. A polar expert, she previously led a UK national research programme on the Southern Ocean and its role in climate. In 2016 she was awarded an OBE for services to science and the public communication of science. She is co-author with HRH The Prince of Wales and Tony Juniper of the Ladybird Book on Climate Change.
Panellist Presenters
Prof Mary E Black
Non-Executive Director, NCAS
Mary Ethna Black is a Non-Executive Director of the National Centre for Atmospheric Science UK. She is a public health doctor, digital health and data expert and has previously worked for WHO and Unicef. She is currently a Senior Advisor in Covid-19 Vaccination and a Covid-19 Incident Director for Scotland.
Prof Rowan Sutton
Director of Climate Science, NCAS, University of Reading
Rowan Sutton is Director of Climate Science for the National Centre for Atmospheric Science, based at the University of Reading. He was a Lead Author of the Working Group I Contribution to IPCC Fifth Assessment Report. His current roles include serving as Chair of the Met Office Hadley Centre Science Review Group, as Co-Chair of the World Climate Research Programme Lighthouse Activity on Explaining and Predicting Earth System Change, and as a member of the Scientific Steering Committee for the UKRI UK Climate Resilience Programme and. His research interests focus on: climate variability and change; climate predictability and prediction; and climate risk assessment. He is Principal Investigator of the North Atlantic Climate System Integrated Study (ACSIS: acsis.ac.uk) - a major multi-disciplinary strategic research programme focussed on understanding changes in the climate of the North Atlantic / European region.
Milan Klöwer
PhD Student, University of Oxford
Milan is a PhD student in climate computing supervised by Tim Palmer at the University of Oxford. After an MSc in ocean modelling and climate physics from the University of Kiel, Germany, he moved to Oxford to do research on low-precision climate computing. He combines information theory and numerical modelling to develop 16-bit weather and climate models that run on conventional hardware and on modern supercomputers. Preserving information despite fewer bits is the paradigm that Milan applies to high-performance computing as well as climate data compression.