Royal Meteorological Society

Student Perspectives: Conference and Workshop Experiences

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By Ana Arama (ana.arama@pgr.reading.ac.uk), Jake Keller (j.p.keller@pgr.reading.ac.uk), Ken Rui Fong (kenrui.fong@pgr.reading.ac.uk) and Maia Arama (m.arama@pgr.reading.ac.uk)

Introduction

Attending conferences and workshops is an essential part of every academic’s life (and perhaps non-academics as well, since some of us will one day leave academia!), and therefore it is only natural that us PhD students get to go as well. In this blog Maia, Jake, Ken and Ana tell us about their experiences of attending some of these scholarly gatherings this year.

Editors’ tip for first-years: though most of these opportunities are communicated to you by your supervisors, research groups or PhD admin, it is good to keep an eye out yourself for conferences that may have skipped their radar. Following key organizations on LinkedIn is always helpful for that. In fact, that is where Ana found out about the energy modelling workshop!

Maia Arama – RMetS Early Career and Student Conference

At the beginning of July, I attended the Royal Meteorological Society (RMetS) Early Career and Student Conference. This 3-day conference is designed for early career researchers, undergraduates, master’s and PhD students. The conference location changes every year; this time it was held at the University of Exeter.

The programme opened with a relaxed social (drinks and pizza) on Sunday. Based on my experience, I highly recommend going to pre-conference socials. I felt this was the ideal way to meet other conference delegates which made walking into the first full day of the conference less intimidating.

Over the following two and a half days, I attended a series of 15-minute talks covering themes relating to weather and climate extremes, atmospheric chemistry, climate impacts, and machine learning. Poster sessions were in the late afternoon on the first two days. I found that presenting my research as a poster was great practice for learning how to build a story for my research and defending my methodological choices – both useful skills to have in the lead-up to the monitoring committee meetings we have here at Reading!

The conference also included a workshop on storytelling for researchers and a panel on science communication, both good reminders that research isn’t just about the work itself but also how we communicate it. Frequent coffee breaks provided ample opportunity for networking and socialising, and a vegan/vegetarian BBQ and quiz on the first day were also a lot of fun.

Overall, I had a genuinely positive experience at this conference. Hearing everyone’s talks and discussing their posters was truly inspiring. As a PhD student, one unexpected highlight was connecting with other PhD students outside of the University of Reading. Being reminded that we all share the same struggles relating to data processing, setbacks and navigating PhD milestones despite different research areas was reassuring!

The conference environment was very relaxed and friendly, so I would highly recommend attending this conference if it’s your first time presenting or if you want something a bit less intimidating than the RMetS Annual Weather and Climate Conference!

More details about the conference can be found here: https://www.rmets.org/conference/early-career-and-student-conference-2026

Jake Keller- Diabatic Processes Workshop

This spring, I attended the Diabatic Processes Workshop in Wolkersdorf, Austria. The workshop brought together around 70 researchers from a wide range of universities and included both senior scientists and early-career researchers, such as me.

The programme was structured into seven presentation sessions over four days, covering topics such as jets, cyclones, predictability, convection, and more. In addition, two poster sessions showcased a broad range of research related to diabatic processes. I presented some of my relevant work in the predictability session, and I even had the opportunity to co-convene a session. The workshop concluded with group discussions, where participants considered the future direction of the field, focusing on what researchers can do next and identifying the data needed to advance our understanding.

Mealtimes were particularly valuable for informal discussions, allowing me to connect with researchers whose papers I had previously read and to ask them questions about their work. Regular coffee breaks also provided opportunities to follow up on presentations while they were still fresh in my mind!

Beyond the scientific content, the workshop provided an excellent opportunity to gain insight into the diverse topics currently being explored within an already specialised research area. Smaller, focused workshops like this also offer valuable opportunities for networking and make it easier to have more meaningful and extended conversations with other scientists.

Since the workshop, I have continued discussions with researchers conducting similar modelling experiments, and we are now sharing updates on our progress and results. I have also had the opportunity to speak with a visiting scientist who attended the workshop, discussing one of his papers that closely relates to my research.

In addition to building connections, these smaller workshops are highly rewarding. They create a strong sense of contributing to and advancing the field, something that isn’t always easy to feel during every stage of a PhD. I would highly recommend this type of workshop to other early-career researchers.

Further information on the workshop can be found here: https://diabatics2026.w.uib.no/

Ken Rui Fong- ParaChute Conference

I attended the ParaChute (“Understanding turbulence and convective processes”) conference held in Reading in July this year. The conference attracted many attendees from a wide range of universities and modelling centres from all over the globe, working across theory, modelling and observations. The conference talks were divided into seven themes across five days, touching on various aspects of convection & turbulence, such as grey-zone parametrization, observing systems and microphysics-turbulence coupling. I personally got to present a poster on my PhD project on grey-zone convection parametrization and benefited greatly from interesting discussions with other senior researchers working on modelling and convection.

Despite the range of topics and different disciplinary approaches, I found nearly all the sessions interesting and relevant because they are underpinned by the ‘grand challenge’ of convection & turbulence parametrization in high-resolution models. I also found it enlightening to hear from researchers from modelling centres talk about their experiences and challenges faced in deploying operational km-scale models and performing forecast verification at convective scales – it was a sobering reminder that many things still have to be done downstream of model development before we might see any gains realized.

Apart from the talks and poster sessions, the committee had organized social events on Wednesday afternoon, and we were given a choice of a tour of the university’s atmospheric observatory, or an orienteering course around the campus. I opted for the former since it would be my first time touring the observatory. The conference capped off with a panel discussion on Friday summarizing contributions from group discussions earlier in the week about the future of modelling and observing systems for convection and turbulence. All in all, I had an interesting time at the ParaChute conference, and hopefully I’ll be able to attend many more like it in the future!

Further information about the Parachute conference can be found at https://research.reading.ac.uk/parachute/.

PyPSA Energy Modelling Workshop, Ana Arama

This September, I attended the PyPSA Workshop held at the University of Birmingham. PyPSA stands for Python for Power System Analysis, and is a free, open-source modelling tool used to simulate and optimise energy systems.

The workshop lasted two days and featured a combination of lectures on PyPSA’s key features and hands-on examples demonstrating how to model different aspects of the energy system. There were five Jupyter notebooks which we could work through, each one focusing on a different aspect of PyPSA. They ranged from basic use cases of the tool to more advanced topics, such as incorporating uncertainty using stochastic modelling and security of electricity supply analysis under different scenarios, like gas price shocks. I particularly enjoyed learning how to use the stochastic modelling feature of PyPSA, since this is a feature that has only recently been added to the toolbox. It was a good way for me to see how uncertainty could be incorporated in energy modelling analysis.

Overall, the workshop was a good opportunity to learn more about the capabilities of PyPSA, and I think it was a good step towards increasing my energy modelling skills. I also found the environment of the workshop to be very relaxed, with plenty of time to ask questions about the various topics covered.

I would recommend this course to anyone who is fairly new to energy modelling and wants to gain a better understanding of how energy modelling tools can aid in power system planning as well as power system design under uncertainty. Although the course provides an introduction to PyPSA, I think it would be helpful to have some prior basic knowledge on terminology used in energy system modelling. I would also recommend doing some of the online examples on the PyPSA website to gain familiarity with the tool before attending the workshop.

The resources from the workshop can be found here: GitHub – pypsalabs/workshop-202609: Workshop materials for energy system modelling with PyPSA, Birmingham, September 2026. · GitHub

Royal Meteorology Conferences

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From 3rd-6th July 2018 the Royal Meteorological Society (RMetS) held two national conferences at the University of York. The Atmospheric Science Conference, joint with NCAS, started off the week and brought together scientists to present and discuss the latest research findings in weather, climate and atmospheric chemistry. The following two days brought the RMetS Student Conference. Both events were well attended by PhD students from Reading and provided a great opportunity to share our work with the wider scientific community.

For a summary of the work presented by Reading students, stick around until the end of the blog!

Atmospheric Science Conference 2018

Weather, Climate and Air Quality

Many of the presentations focused on seasonal forecasting with Adam Scaife (Met Office) giving a keynote address on “Skilful Long Range Forecasts for Europe”. He presented an interesting analysis on the current progress of predicting the North Atlantic Oscillation showing that there is skill in current predictions which could be improved even further by increasing ensemble size. Adam was also awarded the prestigious Copernicus Medal at the conference dinner. Another notable talk was by Reading’s own Ed Hawkins, who presented the benefits of using citizen scientists to rescue weather records. A summary of Ed’s presentation can be accessed below, and you can read more about research involving Citizen Science in Shannon Jones’ blog.

The poster sessions at the conference also gave a great opportunity to look at the breadth of work going on in institutions around the UK. It was also a great time to catch up with colleagues and forge new academic connections.

One of the highlights of the conference was having the conference dinner in the National Railway Museum. This was a fantastic yet surreal location with dining tables set up in the station hall overlooking a suite of old steam trains . The event was made even better by watching England‘s quarter-final world cup game!

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Evolution of Science: Past, Present and Future

Students & Early Career Scientist Conference

The student conference is open to all students with an interest in meteorology, from undergraduate to PhD and early career scientists. The conference aimed to give students the opportunity to meet each other and present their work at an early stage in their career before attending other academic conferences. For many of those attending from Reading this was their first time presenting research at an event outside of the department and provided a great experience to communicate their work with others. Work presented varied from radiative forcing to normal empirical modes (summaries of talks are below). There were also a number of keynote speakers and workshops aimed at addressing the current challenges in atmospheric sciences and skills that are important for researchers.

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Rory Fitzpatrick, presenting on skills for writing as an academic. “I have the Best Words” – How to write articles that impact bigly”

https://twitter.com/jominicdones/status/1015191296334548993

Of course there was also time for socialising with an ice-breaker dinner and pub quiz  and a formal Conference dinner on the Thursday. This was the second student conference I have attended and it was a really great place to discuss my work and meet other students from around the country. I have also attended other academic events with several people that I met at the conference last year, it’s always great to see a friendly face!

The student conference is organised by a committee of students from around the UK. Being on the committee was a great opportunity to learn more about how conferences work and to practice skills such as chairing sessions. It has also been great to get to know lots of different people working within meteorology. If you’re interested in helping organise next year’s conference please do get in touch with Victoria Dickinson at RMetS (Victoria.Dickinson@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:

Godwin Ayesiga presented work on the convective activity that connects Western and Eastern equatorial Africa. Investigating how intraseasonal modes of variability influence intense rainfall.

Matt Priestley presented an assessment of the importance of windstorm clustering on European wintertime insurance losses. More details of this work can be found here.

Lewis Blunn presented his work looking into the ‘grey zone’ of turbulence at model grid scale lengths of 100 m – 1 km. At these scales turbulence is partially resolved by the grid but still needs to be partially parameterised. Lewis finds that spurious grid scale features emerge at scales where turbulence is partially resolved. Model results are poorer in this ‘grey zone’ than when turbulence is fully resolved or fully parameterised.

Alec Vessey presented his work evaluating the representation of Arctic storms in different reanalysis products. He found that there is a difference between different reanlysis and so care should be taken when using these products to analyse Arctic storms.

Dominic Jones presented a technique for extracting modes of variability from atmospheric data, and a test dataset that has been developed to use this technique to examine the relationship of modes of variability associated with the jet-latitude.

Rachael Byrom presented a motivation for quantifying methane’s shortwave radiative forcing. Her work demonstrated a need to use a high resolution narrow-band radiation model to accurately calculate forcings in atmospheric models.

Andrea Marcheggiani presented a poster on the role of resolution in predicting the North Atlantic storm track. An energy budget of the winter climatology (DJF 1979-2018) was presented.

Sally Woodhouse presented her work on the impact of resolution on energy transports into the Arctic. She has found that increasing atmospheric resolution increases the energy transport in the ocean to better agree with observations.

Kaja Milczewska presented work on evaluating the inaccuracies of predicting air quality in the UK.

Having recently passed her viva, Caroline Dunning’s presentation was on precipitation seasonality over Africa under present and future climates. Caroline has developed a new methodology for determining the beginning and end of the wet season across Africa. This has been applied to CMIP5 model output to look at future changes in wet seasons across Africa under climate change.

Why become a Royal Meteorological Society Student member?

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This week the Royal Meteorological Society (RMetS) published their strategic plan for the period of 2018 to 2020, and here at Social Metwork HQ we thought it would be a splendid idea to reflect on the benefits of being a student member of the Royal Meteorological Society.

An important benefit in my opinion is that when becoming a member of RMetS you join a well-established community who hold enthusiasm about the weather and climate at its core. Members come from all corners of the world and at different stages of their career spanning the entire range: from the amateur weather enthusiasts to professionals.  nicole-kuhn-450747As a student, being an RMetS member can lead to conversations that could develop your career and bring unexpected opportunities. This has been greatly enhanced with the RMetS mentoring scheme.

RMetS host many different types of meetings, including annual conferences, meetings hosted by regional centres, and national meetings. Additional gatherings are held by special interest groups, ranging from Weather Arts & Music to Dynamical Problems. Meetings on a regional and national scale provide a platform for discussion and learning amongst those in the field. DEhXj9AXkAARyMM.jpg largeFor a student, the highlight in the RMetS calendar is the annual student conference. Every year, sixty to eighty students come together to present their work and develop professional relationships that continue for years to come. This year’s conference is hosted at the University of York on the 5th and 6th July 2018 (more information). After two student conferences under my belt (see previous blog post), I would highly recommend any early career research scientist attending this event. It serves as a platform to share their own work in a friendly atmosphere and be inspired by the wider student community.

nasa-63030Other benefits to becoming an RMetS student member include eligibility to the Legacies Fund, grants and fellowships, and receiving a monthly copy of Weather magazine. Most importantly though, through becoming a RMetS member you support a professional society who are committed to increasing awareness of the importance of weather and climate in policy and decision-making. Alongside this week’s publication of RMetS’ strategic plan, both the Met Office and NASA have published press releases stating that 2017 was the warmest year on record without El Niño. The atmosphere and oceans of our planet are changing at unprecedented rates: rising sea levels, reductions in Arctic sea-ice, and an increased frequency of extreme weather events to name but a few climate change impacts. Becoming an RMetS student member does not only benefit your career and knowledge, but also supports a society that is committed to promoting and raising awareness of weather and climate science.

RMetS Impact of Science Conference 2017.

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Email – j.f.talib@pgr.reading.ac.uk

“We aim to help people make better decisions than they would if we weren’t here”

Rob Varley CEO of Met Office

This week PhD students from the University of Reading attended the Royal Meteorological Society Impact of Science Conference for Students and Early Career Scientists. Approximately eighty scientists from across the UK and beyond gathered at the UK Met Office to learn new science, share their own work, and develop new communication skills.

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Across the two days students presented their work in either a poster or oral format. Jonathan Beverley, Lewis Blunn and I presented posters on our work, whilst Kaja Milczewska, Adam Bateson, Bethan Harris, Armenia Franco-Diaz and Sally Woodhouse gave oral presentations. Honourable mentions for their presentations were given to Bethan Harris and Sally Woodhouse who presented work on the energetics of atmospheric water vapour diffusion and the representation of mass transport over the Arctic in climate models (respectively). Both were invited to write an article for RMetS Weather Magazine (watch this space). Congratulations also to Jonathan Beverley for winning the conference’s photo competition!

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Jonathan Beverley’s Winning Photo.

Alongside student presentations, two keynote speaker sessions took place, with the latter of these sessions titled Science Communication: Lessons from the past, learning for future impact. Speakers in this session included Prof. Ellie Highwood (Professor of Climate Physics and Dean for Diversity and Inclusion at University of Reading), Chris Huhne (Co-chair of ET-index and former Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change), Leo Hickman (editor for Carbon Brief) and Dr Amanda Maycock (NERC Independent Research Fellow and Associate Professor in Climate Dynamics, University of Leeds). Having a diverse range of speakers encouraged thought-provoking discussion and raised issues in science communication from many angles.

Prof. Ellie Highwood opened the session challenging us all to step beyond the typical methods of scientific communication. Try presenting your science without plots. Try presenting your work with no slides at all! You could step beyond the boundaries even more by creating interesting props (for example, the notorious climate change blanket). Next up Chris Huhne and Leo Hickman gave an overview of the political and media interactions with climate change science (respectively). The Brexit referendum, Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Accord and the rise of the phrase “fake news” are some of the issues in a society “where trust in the experts is falling”. Finally, Dr Amanda Maycock presented a broad overview of influential science communicators from the past few centuries. Is science relying too heavily on celebrities for successful communication? Should the research community put more effort into scientific outreach?

Communication and collaboration became the two overarching themes of the conference, and conferences such as this one are a valuable way to develop these skills. Thank you to the Royal Meteorology Society and UK Met Office for hosting the conference and good luck to all the young scientists that we met over the two days.

#RMetSImpact

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Also thank you to NCAS for funding my conference registration and to all those who provided photos for this post.

What will make the public and politicians take climate change seriously?

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Email: j.f.talib@pgr.reading.ac.uk

Imagine you’re creating a problem that we don’t understand. A problem where the majority of people just go, “meh, not important, I don’t really get it”.

What would it look like?

It would be complex, uncertain, something in the future and possibly an issue that was geographically distant.

Now those factors should you remind of climate change, and on 5th October 2016 the South-East Royal Meteorological Society local centre hosted a meeting where a panel of experts were presented with the question, “What will make the public and politicians take climate change seriously?”

The panel included professionals from a range of backgrounds including Professor Sir Brian Hoskins, leading expert in meteorology and climate, and first director of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change, Imperial College London. Dr Rachel McCloy a well-respected figure in behavioural science with experience in policy making in the former Department of Energy and Climate Change and the Treasury. Finally, Paul Simons a prominent journalist for the Times known for the depth of scientific understanding in his articles.

Images taken during the RMetS South East local centre meeting (06/10/16). Left image: Panelists (from left to right) including Dr Rachel McCloy, Sir Brian Hoskins and Paul Simons.

Sir Brian Hoskins opened the discussion with the challenge that we have a responsibility to “encourage” rather than “make” the public take climate change seriously, and recognised the progress in politics including targets announced in COP21, Paris and the UK Climate Change Act 2008. However, it was also recognised that climate change may not be prioritised high enough in political agendas, and the question was raised on whether governments take their environmental global responsibility seriously enough?

Discussion then moved onto personal actions each one of us can take to increase the public response. Repeating the “doom and gloom” message over climate change can become boring and repetitive, and we need to bring a positive message to tackling this global issue. We also need to recognise the responsibility of the individual in a global context and introduce small steps that can be taken to reduce our environmental impact.

One key message from Brian’s talk, and the meeting as whole, was that it’s currently hard for a member of the public to understand what climate change actually means to their daily lives. What impact will a 2°C global temperature rise actually cause? Researchers, the media and policymakers need to relate the science of global warming to our everyday lives, whether that’s through health, nutrition, the working environment, or air quality to name a few.

Our second speaker, Dr Rachel McCloy, introduced psychological behavioural frameworks that are introduced by climate change and how they impact the progression towards successful mitigation. For example, emotional reactions towards climate change can include dread and injustice, and this combined with typical adjectives used to describe the environmental changes including “natural” and “uncontrollable”, can lead to an increased likelihood of no effort being taken at all against climate change.

A component of Rachel’s talk I found particularly interesting was the impact of over-congratulating individuals and societies for taking “baby steps”. When we congratulate or applaud an action too much it reduces the likelihood of an even better action taking place. Therefore, as a society, we need to keep looking at the next step to mitigating against climate change. If we think about this in the present day, could we agree that we congratulated the agreements met in COP21 Paris too much, and as a result the likelihood of ratification and progress being made has been dropped. We as a community need to hold each other to account even when those “baby steps” have been made.

And finally, Paul, a leading science journalist for The Times, brought to the discussion how the media can be used to encourage climate change to be taken seriously. Everything in the media is a story and when a phenomena such climate change impacts health, water or even transportation it can gain a public interest. To increase the media’s attention to climate change, greater emphasis is needed on how environmental changes will impact our daily lives. Paul also reminded us that the public have begun to associate extreme weather events to climate change, whether proven to be a result of anthropogenic action or not. A recent example that comes to my mind is the recent European thunderstorms that occurred last summer. The media should be used to successfully “shape opinions” and it is up to us to grasp the opportunities that they have to offer.

After an intriguing set of three short talks to answer the question “What will make the public and politicians take climate change seriously?”, discussion was opened to the audience. Questions included: What is the importance of education to solving climate change? How much advocacy work should a climate scientist get involved in? The meeting as a whole stimulated a continued discussion on how climate change can be communicated effectively to “encourage” the public and politicians to take climate change seriously.

I would like to thank all three panellists for a set of thought-provoking and challenging talks. Thank you to the Royal Meteorological Society for supporting the local centre event, and to find out more about meetings taking place in your region check out https://www.rmets.org/events/forthcoming-meetings.