Profile

I live in Leeds with my husband. I have recently started learning how to create digital animation. I love to cook and bake, recently making a selection of sweets.

My pronouns are she/her.

CAMRa Radar, the largest Meteorological radar in the world.

I am a final year PhD student at the University of Leeds. I work with ground-based weather radar. Typically radars are used to observe the weather, and you might see brightly coloured odd-shaped clouds from the radar on the forecast, telling you where it has rained. These radars operate 24/7 unless they are broken, but I work with research radars, which do not operate all the time, but for specific weather events, or projects. A project might involve a radar and the UK’s atmospheric research aircraft (FAAM), and usually lots of weather balloons. I aim to improve the coincident measurements between the radar and aircraft. I do this to look at calculations of how much water there is in a cloud, or how many insects there are in the air.

First thing I do in my workday is to check my calendar to see when I have meetings, I then check my emails, and answer anything important. Some days I might have back to back meetings, now all online. Other days, I have a mixture of writing and coding. The pandemic meant fieldwork was cancelled this summer, but we have some planned for next summer which I am really looking forward to. Typically I would spend a total of a month or more away on fieldwork, spread throughout the year. I also do visits to labs for collaboration and conferences. I have a set up with two monitors from my laptop, as it means I can have code running on one, and then looking up bits on the other or writing. I mainly code in python, but I have a few other languages under my belt.

Right now I am working on finishing up a coding package and running some performance tests which are taking ~25mins. Whilst that is running, I am reading lots of scientific papers and writing up the equations I am using in the code in the correct format for my thesis.

I don’t work weekends unless for fieldwork, but then I would take a few extra days holiday. I typically start work at 9 and finish between 5 and 6. However, I do not do this every day, some days, I might stop earlier or have long breaks as I have flexible working hours. As a PhD student, my time is my own, so sometimes I will take a restorative day off mid-week.