Profile

I live near Reading with my wife, two daughters, two rabbits, four chickens and too many eggs. The humans in the house all like baking things, especially cake, but even so, still too many eggs. Aside from my family, I like cake, guitars, live music, speaking other languages badly, running very long distances (=more cake) and books. My pronouns are he/him.

One of the ways scientists understand how the Earth’s climate works and make predictions about how it will change in the future is with computer models that can simulate the physics going on the atmosphere, oceans, ice sheets and so on. Some of these models are so complex and have so many different parts to them that we can only run them on the biggest computers in the world. For the last twenty years I’ve been hacking these models to let them work in new and interesting ways – my PhD was spent studying the climate of an Earth submerged under water but I’ve also spun the Earth backwards, turned off the sun… you get the idea.

Right now I work as part of the team looking after the new UK Earth System model, a national project to build probably the most complex climate model in the world. The computers we need to use to run these models take up entire buildings all on their own. My job has been to find ways to make the ice sheets in the climate model melt and flow, which is really important if we want to find out about future sea-level rise, but also means we can try playing with things like glacial cycles and bury the country in ice 🙂

My typical day looks pretty boring – I cycle or run to the University, and sit in front of a computer until it’s time to go home again! On the other hand, the PC on my desk is connected to some of the biggest computers on the planet, and inside those computers we can play with copies of the whole world.

I might fast-forward time to 2500 and see how much Greenland might melt, or go back 25 thousand years and see how many kilometres of ice I can make grow over the United States. I work with scientists from all over the world, so I might have a video-conference with someone in Norway, or swap emails with someone in Japan.