Hannah Christensen (she/her)

I am Associate Professor of Physical Climate in the Physics Department, and a tutorial fellow at Wadham College. I lead the Atmospheric Processes group.

Processes occur in the atmosphere on a wide range of spatio-temporal scales, from cloud processes on the micrometre scale, through convective aggregation on the hundreds of kilometre scale, up to global scale emergent phenomena such as the El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO). Yet we require our weather and climate models to capture all of these processes and their interactions to make accurate predictions – a formidable challenge! To improve predictions, we need a deeper understanding of the underlying physics together with an accurate characterisation of uncertainties associated with the modelling process. This is the overarching aim of our research.

Key research themes in my group include: investigation into sources of atmospheric predictability such as the El Nino-Southern Oscillation; the use of extremely high-resolution simulations to understand small-scale atmospheric processes; and the improvement of atmospheric process representation in world leading weather and climate models. To achieve the above, we combine Machine Learning tools with use a variety of other techniques, from analysing simple chaotic systems to global climate simulations. The overarching aim is to better understand the behaviour of the atmosphere, and thereby improve our ability to predict this behaviour.

I am an Associate Editor at JAMES - Journal of Advances in Modelling the Earth System. I am also a NERC Independent Research Fellow and hold a Leverhulme Trust Research Leadership Award.

For more information, please see the Atmospheric Processes webpage.

Equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI)

I am EDI lead for the Intelligent Earth CDT. Our goal is for EDI to permeate everything we do, from how we run admissions, to the culture we foster on the CDT. If you have any questions, comments, or complaints related to EDI issues, please don't hesitate to get in touch via email, or simply pop round my office (F52 in AOPP).