About

I am a Royal Society University Research Fellow at Imperial College London in the Space and Atmospheric Physics Group, where I investigate the controlling factors of clouds, particularly the impact of ships and aircraft.

Clouds are a central component of the Earth's energy budget, both reflecting incoming sunlight (a cooling effect) and trapping outgoing infra-red (a warming), as well as being an important component of the water cycle. Cloud processes span a range of scales, from the formation of cloud droplets at the micron scale to the dynamics of supercell storms and extra-tropical cyclones that are hundreds of km across. This complexity also leads to uncertainty, clouds are responsible for some of the largest uncertainties in the human forcing of the climate system and the feedbacks that determine the temperature change in response to that forcing.

Research areas

My research focussing on understanding the processes controlling clouds - what sets these properties at a global scale, how can we best observe and simulate them and how do they respond to human activity? This work falls into three main areas:

I am also interested in the history of meteorology, writing a chapter for a book on John Ruskin (Ruskin and meteorology) and giving a talk on the history of cloud physics at Imperial College.

Publications

Many of my papers have a summary on this website. You can find a full list of publications on my Imperial webpage or on Google Scholar.