Have you ever heard of a yottabyte? Big Data & Its Challenges

Recently, I was a mentor on the online FutureLearn course “Big Data and the Environment”, run by the Institute of Environmental Analytics. While “big data” can be a little vague as a description, the data I work with on a daily basis comes under this classification, and working with it has been one of the biggest challenges of my PhD. My role on this course was to peruse the discussion boards and join in with discussions / answer questions related to the content. I found the course really interesting myself, and thought I’d write a bit about Big Data and some of its challenges, including ones I’ve encountered myself.

Seasonal River Flow Forecasts Go Live!

I’ve been pretty quiet on here lately – and that’s because I’ve been working incredibly hard on an exciting project that I’ve hinted at a couple of times recently. Today, that project finally went live online and I can share it with you! I’ve been working with ECMWF (the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts) to set up a new forecast product for the Global Flood Awareness System (GloFAS). The new forecast is a seasonal river flow outlook for the global river network – the first of its kind to exist operationally!

10 Things I Wish I Knew at the Start of my PhD

At the start of the new academic year, I was asked to give a presentation at our department’s postgraduate discussion group on the ‘things I wish I knew at the start of my PhD’. I was pretty quick to say yes to this, as I’d found the same presentation from a then-3rd-year pretty helpful and a good insight when I started my PhD! Since I’ve now been working on my PhD for 3 whole years, I also do happen to have a few tips for surviving (and enjoying!) a PhD, plus few stories to go along with them. Hopefully these can be useful to some new (or aspiring) PhD students, or provide some additional motivation / tips / amusement to those who are a little further along already!

The Land of Smiles

This time last year… I was in the land of smiles – Thailand! At the start of my placement at ECMWF (which I wrote about in my last blog post), I was asked to head out to Bangkok for a workshop on flood forecasting in transboundary rivers (in this case, those that cross country borders)

A taster of life after the PhD…

At the moment, my day-to-day PhD life is pretty typical; I’m working on getting all the data I need to analyse and write up the paper I’m working on. I look forward to writing about this when it begins to take a bit more shape rather than just being a bunch of python scripts! So instead, this is going to be my first “this time last year” post – because this time last year my day-to-day life wasn’t so typical of a PhD student!

An Insight into Other Students’ #PhDLife

Over the past few months, I’ve been to several different conferences – from the enormous European Geosciences Union annual conference which had 14,500 scientists in attendance from over 100 different countries, to a small workshop at my University with ~20 participants from different backgrounds. Two weeks ago, however, was my first time attending a Doctoral Training Partnership (DTP) conference.

How did I end up here?

In this post, I wanted to talk about how I ended up doing a PhD in the first place – what made me decide that a PhD was a good idea? Why did I decide to go down this route in the first place? Sometimes, especially when the going gets a bit tough or you get engrossed in programming and forget about the “big picture”, it’s good to remind yourself of why you started – so this post is my way of doing that!

Introduction from a Scientist(?)

Writing the first blog post is a little like starting an academic paper from scratch; the blank page is a little daunting – there’s plenty to say, but what’s the best way of saying it?

Let me introduce myself – I’m Rebecca, and I’m a PhD student at the University of Reading doing some research on flood forecasting and predictability around the globe (more on that another time).