The Social Metwork

With thanks to Kaja Milczewska

Every year the PhD students in the Meteorology Department invite a distinguished scientist to spend a few days with us. This year, the students voted for the Visiting Scientist to be Prof. Olivia Romppainnen-Martius, who came to the Department from 4th-7th June 2018.

Prof. Romppainen-Martius is based at the University of Bern, in Switzerland, as an Associate Professor researching climate impacts.

Olivia’s research interests broadly covers mid-latitude atmospheric dynamics, with topics from how blocking events are precursors Sudden Stratospheric Warming events, to more impact based work on heavy Alpine precipitation and extreme hail in and around Switzerland. Her main research areas can be summarised as dynamics of short-term climate variation, forecasting and statistics of high-impact weather events and mid-latitude weather systems. More about her research and publications can be found here.

As is usual for the start of our distinguished visitor’s stay, Prof. Romppainen-Martius’s visit began with an introduction from Prof. Sue Gray during the coffee reception. This was immediately followed by a special seminar, titled “Recent hail research in Switzerland – the challenges and delights of complex orography and crowd-sourced data”. Her talk covered various probabilistic measures for predicting hail in the mountainous region that is Switzerland and how the climatology of these identified events is strongly linked with these mountainous areas. Verification of these predictions has recently been achieved through observer reports via the MeteoSwiss app, where observers record the time, location, and size of the hail they have observed.

The day was rounded off with a social at Zero Degrees, with Olivia and many PhD students engaging in fruitful conversation over pizza and beer.

After a busy first day, the second day of her visit included individual meetings with both research staff and students, and attending the Mesoscale and HHH (Hoskins-Half-Hour) research groups. On Wednesday 5th July, some PhD students presented their research to Olivia to showcase the breadth of topics covered in the Meteorology department. Interestingly, one of the talks ‘reliably’ informed us that Arctic sea-ice melting meant it was now possible to go on holiday cruises to see penguins. Clearly these penguins are on holiday too…

At the weekly PhD Group meeting, Prof. Romppainen-Martius gave some useful advice on careers in academic research and the pathway to her current position – which of course includes lots of skiing. Additionally, she advertised some post-doctoral funding opportunities in Switzerland and Germany, which was sure to encourage the keen skiers in the crowd. This was an engaging open discussion about the realities of research life, and attendance was made all the better by biscuits from the group leaders Beth and Liam.

On the last day of her visit (Thursday 8th June), Olivia gave her second departmental seminar titled “Periods of recurrent synoptic-scale Rossby waves and associated persistent moderate temperature extremes”. The seminar was followed by a well-attended leaving reception, which concluded Olivia’s visit to our department. The students prepared a photo frame and other England themed items as a gift, to thank our distinguished scientist for accepting the invitation to spend an inspiring week with us.  Unfortunately, Olivia could not stay for the ‘world-renowned’ annual Met BBQ and Barn Dance on the Friday, but nonetheless we hope that she enjoyed her visit as much as we did!