People

Alissa leads on the financial and budgetary management of HELIX. If you would like to pose questions to our Management Group or Steering Committee please do get in touch.

Science Communication.

Camilla is based at the Met Office working on a PhD with the University of Leeds on future food and water security in South Asia under climate change. Camilla's main role within helix is to consider water resources for the South Asia region using the integrated impacts land surface model; the Joint UK Land Environment Simulator (JULES) and existing HighNoon RCM simulations. The additional processes included in the JULES model will provide a more complete picture of water resources of South Asia than previously possible, allowing quantitative analysis of the effects of changes in river flow and glaciers on water resources and the implications of these changes on water availability for irrigation and therefore crop yields.

Eleanor is part of the Engagement and Communication team for HELIX (WP1) involved in stakeholder engagement, training workshops and early career scientist development. Also acting as a bridge to other relevant FP7 projects and also the WCRP Coordinated Regional Downscaling Experiment (CORDEX).

Rossby Centre, SMHI.

John is a Senior Climate Scientist at the Met Office Hadley Centre and has a background investigating changing climate extremes using climate models and observations, including the development of new daily observational datasets. He has worked on analyses of extreme events on global and regional scales and has also been involved in regional extremes workshops in Asia and Africa with the WMO Expert Team on Climate Change Detection and Indices. John is working on HELIX WP3 on high resolution global modelling and extreme events, and will be providing new climate projections using the HadGEM3 climate model.

Kate came to the Met Office as a climate impacts scientist in 2012 having completed a DPhil and post-doc at Oxford on Amazon climate. For the past year she has been working on implementing irrigation in JULES with a view to understanding the interactions between climate and impacts sectors.

Klaus Wyser is a senior researcher at the Rossby Centre, SMHI, working with the development and applications of the EC-EARTH model. His background is in the parameterisation of clouds and radiation. He was leading the CMIP5 working group within the EC-EARTH consortium and organized the contributions from the EC-EARTH community to CMIP5. Currently he is a work package leader in the EU FP7 projects SPECS (seasonal to decadal predictions) and HELIX (impact of a future warming). In preparation for the coming CMIP6 he is heavily involved in the integration of new model components and the tuning of the next version of the EC-EARTH model (http://www.ec-earth.org).

Dr. Lorenzo Alfieri holds a Master degree in Civil Engineering and in 2008 he earned a PhD in Hydraulic Engineering at the Polytechnic of Torino, Italy. He was a grantholder at the ITHACA Research Centre in Torino, a partner of the World Food Program. Later on he worked at the Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European Commission, in Ispra (Italy), where he carried out applied research in the field of flood hazard mapping, streamflow forecasting and flood early warning. In 2012 he joined the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), in the United Kingdom. At the ECMWF he was involved in the monitoring and evaluation of the operational runs of the European Flood Awareness System (EFAS), as well as in conducting applied research in the field of ensemble hydro-meteorological forecasting. In 2014, he moved back to the JRC to work on the HELIX FP7 project, dealing with the assessment of the impact of weather-driven natural hazards at European and global scale under future climate projections. Lorenzo has coauthored 14 articles in peer review scientific journals and has been referee for a number of publications.

Mark is involved in WP10, looking at tipping points in the climate system.

With climate change, we may start seeing outbreaks of diseases occurring in the near future. For instance, malaria is expected to become prevalent in Europe in a not-so-far future. My research entails measuring the benefits of avoiding such disease outbreaks in the future. While it may seem obvious that disease outbreaks are quite unpleasant for societies (nobody wants malaria!), it is not so obvious at what cost these events should be dealt with. My PhD career, funded with HELIX, will involve looking at how much society is willing to pay to confront future outbreaks of diseases like malaria. This raises many interesting conceptual and technical challenges because many of the societies concerned are not familiar with outbreaks of these diseases. Nevertheless it is an important issue, for policymakers and researchers alike, to consider when imagining a "globally warmed" world.

Neil Adger is Professor of Human Geography. He teaches, supervises graduate students, and researches in the areas of environmental geography, ecological and institutional economics, and global environmental change.

Olivier's expertise is in atmospheric and climate modelling with strong skills in anthropogenic/biogenic emissions and their effects on the atmosphere. At UCL-Energy he contributes to the support of the Integrated Assessment Modelling of UK and global energy systems and developing the climate module of the integrated assessment model TIAM-UCL.

Professor Pierre Friedlingstein is Chair in Mathematical Modelling of Climate Systems. His research interests are in the field of global carbon cycle and global biogeochemical cycles.

Professor Richard Betts is Chair in Climate Impacts at the University of Exeter and Head of Climate Impacts in the Met Office Hadley Centre. He has worked in climate modelling since 1992, with a particular interest in the impacts of climate change on ecosystems and the interactions with other impacts of climate change such as on water resources. He is also interested in the wide-ranging effects of land use and land cover change on climate. He has pioneered a number of key developments in the extension of climate models to include biological processes. He leads the EU Framework 7 Project HELIX (High-End cLimate Impacts and eXtremes), which assesses the impacts of climate change at 2, 4 and 6°C global warming above pre-industrial state.

Chair of Climate Impacts at the University of Exeter and Head of Climate Impacts at the Met Office Hadley Centre.

Sarah's role in HELIX is to investigate the response of the Himalayan glaciers to climate change and the implications this will have for water resources in South Asia. To do this, she is implementing a glacier flow model into the JULES land surface scheme. The model will be used to access the impact of glacier change on river flows, irrigation and agriculture in the Himalayas and the Indo-Gangetic plain.

Dr Stephan Harrison‘s main research interests lie in geomorphological responses to climate change. He has worked for twelve field seasons on the glaciers of Patagonia studying their fluctuation histories over the last 15,000 years and the geomorphological impact of recent glacier retreat on valley-side slopes.

Sven investigates the higher-order economic losses and damages due to extreme weather events along the global supply network. Using the model Acclimate he contributes to studying the resilience of the global supply system leading to identification of possiblities and limits of global adaptation strategies along different warming scenarios. 

http://www.pik-potsdam.de/research/sustainable-solutions/models/acclimate/acclimate

Tim leads WP10, looking at tipping points and potential early warning systems. He is Chair in Climate Change/Earth Systems Science at the University of Exeter.

Tim is working on the 'Unwelcome Messages' policy workshop.