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

Sprites & Elves: Magical creatures or weather phenomena?

Thunderstorms are infamous for their beautiful, if dangerous, light displays and ear-splitting thunder. But did you know that while the thunder and lightning are capturing your attention near the ground, there could be something even more incredible happening way above the storm clouds, on the edge of space?

My experience at EGU 2018: chairing a session & presenting a PICO

The European Geosciences Union (EGU) has one of the largest scientific conferences in the world, held every year in Vienna. Last week, 15,075 scientists from 106 different countries made their way to the Austria Center for more than 17,000 talks, posters and PICO presentations over 666 sessions. I’ve previously seen the Austria Centre likened to

Driving the Great Ocean Road

Driving the Great Ocean Road was a fantastic adventure, there’s just something about a leisurely drive around winding roads with views over the stunning coastline – I was in love with Australia from Day 1. I think you’ll see why…

Melbourne and “Breaking the Barriers”

If you follow me on Instagram, you’ll know that outside of my research, travel is also a big part of my life, and I jump at the chance to explore a new corner of the world! So I not only flew out to Australia for the conference, but afterwards I hired a car with my partner in crime and we took ourselves on a 2-week road trip around Victoria. So in this post, I’ll talk a bit about the HEPEX conference and the week I spent in Melbourne, and you’ll see a couple of travel posts pop up soon as I write about our time exploring the land down under!

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!