The Pros and Cons of writing a thesis by publication (& PhD Update: 1 month to go!)

Yep, it’s 1 month today until I submit my thesis to the University of Reading Graduate School. I’m starting to see the finish line after 4 years working on my PhD!

So how’s the thesis going?

A couple of months ago, my second “science chapter” had just been published, and I was working on the analysis for my third and final science chapter, with 3 whole chapters left to write. As I write this blog post, I have just finished writing up my final science chapter, and I’ll be submitting it for publication very soon! I’m submitting my thesis as a collection of papers, and this one will be the final paper of the thesis – luckily, the last one doesn’t need to be published by the time I submit my thesis, it just has to have been submitted for publication. Since I do still need to have an entire thesis, I also need to have an (unpublished) overall introduction, additional literature review, and an overall conclusions chapter. The thesis will look a little like this:

Why did I become a scientist?

This is a question I love to ask other people – I love to find out why they first embarked on their career, or project, or why they chose a specific degree, etc. Some people have a story you can tell they love to talk about, and some people I’ve asked have kind of just fallen into their career through a series of decisions and opportunities.

If you’ve read even one of my blog posts before, you probably already know that I am just a little (read: a lot) obsessed with the weather, particularly severe weather. But how did I get so interested in the weather? And why did I become a scientist (more specifically, a meteorologist)?

When I was 12, my family flew out to Florida for an amazing summer holiday (can you see where this is going yet?). It was so much fun – we visited beautiful beaches, screamed at the top of our lungs on some crazy rollercoasters, and saw dolphins playing in the wild from a boat (actually, that might’ve been 2005 – but you get the idea)! But on Friday 13th August 2004, Hurricane Charley tore through Florida, and we experienced the full force of a Category 4 (verging on Category 5) tropical cyclone (wait…what’s a tropical cyclone/hurricane?). Hurricane Charley is one of the strongest hurricanes to make landfall in the U.S., and would also be the first of 4 hurricanes to impact Florida during that infamous summer.

PhD Update: 3 months to go!

Wait… but it hasn’t been 3 months since your “6-months-to-go” update?! No, it’s only been 2 months (and it feels like it’s only been about 2 weeks!). I promise I can count! It turns out that the “what’s next?” part of my plan has changed a little, and so I need to submit my thesis early. So although I my funding doesn’t run out until mid-January 2019, and I had hoped to submit just before Christmas, I now plan to submit my thesis in November – eek! My supervisors and I decided that an end-of-November aim was feasible, and if I can finish earlier then that would be a bonus!

How can we forecast river flow around the globe, months in advance?

My PhD research looks into how we can provide earlier indications of flood hazard at the global scale. One way of doing this is through seasonal forecasts of high (or low) river flow. Seasonal forecasts are designed to provide an early indication that a given variable, such as temperature, rainfall or even river flow, will differ from normal in the coming weeks or months.

While many operational centres produce seasonal forecasts of meteorological variables, operational seasonal forecasts of hydrological variables, particularly at large or global scales, are few and far between. Over the past couple of years, I’ve worked with scientists at ECMWF and the University of Reading to develop the first global-scale seasonal hydro-meteorological forecasting system; this blog post talks about why we implemented such a system, how it works, and the new forecast products it provides. This research has just been published in Geoscientific Model Development. 

Natural Hazards: Hurricanes, Typhoons & Cyclones

Ever wondered what the difference is between a hurricane, a typhoon and a cyclone? If so, you’re not the only one! And I can answer this one pretty quickly for you: there’s no difference at all! Hurricane, typhoon and cyclone are all different names for the same natural hazard: tropical cyclones. In the Atlantic, they’re usually called hurricanes, in the western Pacific, typhoons, and in Australia and the Indian Ocean, cyclones.

In this blog post, I’ve answered a few questions about tropical cyclones – what they are, how, where and when they happen (& can we get them in the UK?), and what the dangers are. I personally think that they’re one of the most fascinating (and frightening!) types of weather out there and I can talk about them all day – so feel free to ask me questions in the comments below! More on why I’m quite so interested in tropical cyclones another time…

Hurricane Sandy. Image via NASA

PhD Update: Less than 6 months to go!

So I’ve now been working on my PhD for ~3.5 years – which means only one thing – I have to submit my thesis within the next 6 months! (Well, 5.5 because I’m a little late writing this…) Time is a funny thing; in some ways the past few years have flown by, but when I think of everything I’ve achieved during my PhD, and see PhD students that started at the same time as me submitting their thesis, I realise how long it’s been!

I’ve previously written about what I’m researching (My Research – Minus the Jargon), but I’ve not really written any PhD updates, which I had planned to do! So I figured I’d start now, with the “6 months to go” milestone, and write a brief update on how my PhD is going and what I’ve got left to do!

What is El Niño? (And can it really impact coffee & chocolate prices?)

You may have seen the infamous El Niño mentioned in the headlines as the cause of floods, droughts, fires, storms, expensive coffee & chocolate etc etc. But if El Niño is the cause of all of these different hazards, what actually is El Niño?

Psst! Keep reading to see a fantastic cartoon of El Niño and La Niña by Louise Arnal!

What is El Niño?

While often assumed to be a storm or a weather event, El Niño is actually

10 tips & take-homes from the London SciComm Symposium

On Friday, Louise and I went along to our first London SciComm Symposium, having both been more and more involved in various SciComm events recently.

Louise co-organised Reading’s Planet Earth Pint of Science events this year, did a stand-up set at Science Showoff in London and has been doing some fantastic SciArt, while I’ve been blogging away as per usual on here, via guest posts on other blogs, and sharing other scientists’ thoughts via the HEPEX blog. I also helped out with the Pint of Science flooding evening, and we both spent an afternoon helping to run the Water@Reading tent at the University of Reading’s Big Band Lunch, where kids and adults alike came along to play a virtual reality flash flood game and add to our river art masterpiece. We’re also hoping to announce a collaborative SciComm project in the coming months which we’re pretty excited about!

Louise (left) and myself (right) at the Queen Mary University’s Charterhouse Square campus in London

The SciComm symposium was a day for discussions surrounding various aspects of Science Communication, with talks and panel sessions focusing on informal SciComm (freelancing, SciComm-ing while researching, …), formal SciComm (science communicators working in Universities, research centres, museums, …), and on “Why?” – why do SciComm?

In this post, I’ve rounded up the top 10 things I took away from the day as lessons learned and food for thought:

Natural Hazards: Volcanoes

So if you’ve read my blog before, you know that I’m in no way a volcanologist… I’m a hydro-meteorologist. But I do have an interest in (read: obsession with) natural hazards of all different varieties, so over time I’m going to be writing a series of posts on various natural hazards. You can read my previous post about tornadoes (and storm chasing!) here, and in this post I’m going to talk a little bit about volcanoes!

Eruption of the Holuhraun volcano in Iceland, 2014. Photo via Sparkle Motion on Flickr.

Pint of Science 2018 – Flooding: Is it all water under the bridge?

Pint of Science is all about taking science outside of the “lab” (or field, or office!) and bringing researchers into local pubs to present their science to people who wouldn’t normally get to hear about and discuss it.

I first heard about Pint of Science last year through twitter and was keen to get involved in my local events. When I found out that Pint of Science was coming to Reading for the first time this year, and that one of the Planet Earth themed evenings was closely related to the work we do in the Water@Reading research group, I jumped at the chance to help out. In total, there were 9 events covering 3 different themes in Reading, with hundreds more across the UK and 20 other countries worldwide! In this blog post, I’ve written about some of the science that was featured at the “Flooding: is it all water under the bridge?” event.