Email: d.w.j.jones@pgr.reading.ac.uk
This year at the University of Birmingham, from the 2nd to the 5th of July, the Royal Meteorological Society (RMetS) held two national conferences. The first, the Atmospheric Science Conference, was well attended by staff and post-docs. The second, the Student and Early Career Scientists Conference, was attended by PhD students, including some of us from Reading. It proved a great opportunity to share research and best practices as well as network with both old and new colleagues from other institutions.
The Student and Early Career conference is open to all students and researchers just embarking upon their science career. It aims to give those in the field the opportunity to meet and present work before going on to attend more specialized conferences. For some of the Reading delegates this was the first opportunity to present work outside of the department to a wider audience who they weren’t already familiar with, or in quite the same field as. Presentations from Reading students ranged from topics such as thermal updrafts to atmosphere and ocean model coupling (summaries below). There were also keynote sessions that discussed important topics in atmospheric sciences as well as addressing the impact and reach that social media can give research.
There was also time to socialize, with an ice-breaker event on the Wednesday before the conference and a conference dinner on the Thursday evening. Keen to give the participants an opportunity to maximise their networking time, on Wednesday several scientists who had attended the Atmospheric Science Conference that day volunteered to stay behind, share their experiences during their careers and chat to the Early Career conference delegates over a few drinks.
Having also attended events through other institutions (such as the doctoral training partnership SCENARIO) there were also many friendly faces from outside Reading in attendance, and it was a great opportunity to catch up and share progress on our work. One of the delegates was even an old friend from when I was an undergraduate, so you never know what familiar faces you might find!
The student conference is organised by a committee of students and early career scientists (usually but not always attendees from previous conferences) from around the UK. Being a member of the committee is a fantastic opportunity to hone one’s organizational and planning skills, as well as getting invaluable practice for things like chairing sessions. If you’re interested in helping organise next year’s conference please do get in touch with Catherine Bicknell at RMetS (catherine.bicknell@rmets.org) or if you’re thinking about attending then you can start by joining the society where you’ll hear about all the other great events they host.
Highlights of the work presented by Reading students:
- Kris Boykin presented work on clustering ensemble members in high resolution forecasts in order to extract likely scenarios and assign probabilities to each one.
- Liam Till presented results from tracking thermals in deep convective clouds using the world’s largest fully steerable meteorological radar.
- Sally Woodhouse presented a study of the effect of resolution of atmospheric models on heat transport into the Arctic using a coupled ocean-atmosphere climate model.
- Emanuele Gentile presented a poster on his work determining how coupled models can improve extreme surface wind predictions using storm Helene as a case study.
- Jake Bland presented a poster on the humidity biases in the stratosphere in the Met Office operational model assessed relative to experimental radiosonde data gathered during the North Atlantic Waveguide and Downstream impacts EXperiment (NAWDEX) field campaign.
The Social Metwork 
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