Dr Cathryn Birch
- Position: Associate Professor in Meteorology and Climate
- Areas of expertise: tropical meteorology and climate; convection and severe weather; monsoons and the water cycle; convection-permitting models; climate impacts (flooding, health, agriculture); weather forecasting
- Email: C.E.Birch@leeds.ac.uk
- Phone: +44(0)113 343 9831
- Location: 10.07 Priestley Building
- Website: Personal homepage | Googlescholar | ORCID
Profile
Cathryn is an Associate Professor in Meteorology and Climate, who brings expertise to SEE in process study within dynamical meteorology and high-resolution modelling of weather and climate. Cathryn works to better understand the drivers of convection and high impact weather on a range of timescales. She works closely with the Met Office to improve weather forecasts and climate projections. More recently, she has worked with scientists from other fields to advance research in climate impacts related to health, agriculture and flooding.
Prior to this Cathryn worked for the Met Office but based within ICAS, where she worked on using convection-permitting model simulations to better understand tropical convection and the water cycle in West Africa, Australia and South-East Asia. Cathryn has also worked as a Research Fellow in ICAS, studying the dynamics and water cycle of the West African Monsoon and diagnosing the reasons for biases in atmospheric models. Cathryn's PhD was on the Arctic boundary layer and involved a significant amount of data collection through field work, which she then used to evaluate and improve atmospheric models.
- 2003: William Arthur Crabtree Scholarship
- 2013: L F Richardson Award
- 2014: European Meteorological Society Young Scientist Award
Research interests
Current projects include:
- TerraMaris: the UK contribution to the Years of the Maritime Contient field campaign and modelling study
- GCRF-African SWIFT: Science for Weather Information and Forecasting Techniques
- GCRF-Africap: Climate Smart Agricultural Development
- Yorkshire iCASP: Yorkshire Integrated Catchment Solutions Programme: Enhanced surface water flood forecasts for Yorkshire
- WCSSP SE Asia: Weather and Climate Science Service Partnership projects covering Tropical Cyclones, Forecast Evaluation and the Vertical Structure of the Maritime Continent
- GENESIS: Triggering of Convection. Part of the ParaCon programme.
- Future Climate for Africa IMPALA project: Improving Model Processes for African Climate
- K-Scale – Towards km-scale global modelling
Qualifications
- PhD, Atmospheric Science, University of Leeds
- BSc, Environmental Science, University of Leeds
Professional memberships
- Panel member of WCRP GEWEX/CLIVAR Monsoons Panel
- Associate Fellow of the Royal Meteorological Society
Student education
- Computer programming in Python
- Atmospheric Science fieldwork
- Meteorology and climate science modules
Research groups and institutes
- Atmospheric and Cloud Dynamics
- water@leeds
- Institute for Climate and Atmospheric Science