News & Updates

2026

October 2026

  • I spoke to USA Today about El Niño and the stratospheric polar vortex.

August 2026

  • New paper led by Jaewon Lee (Columbia) examining the role of North Pacific weather patterns in modulating stratosphere-to-troposphere ozone transport published in GRL!
  • The State of the Climate in 2025 report has been published. I contributed to the “Atmosphere” section of Chapter 5, The Arctic, led by Amy Butler.

July 2026

  • I contributed to the 25 July edition of New Scientist, answering a reader’s question about heating stale air versus fresh air.
  • I attended the RMetS Annual Weather and Climate Conference at the University of Exeter, where I presented our work on summertime Greenland High regime trends.
  • I’ve added a “Useful Links” page which includes links to a range of web resources to monitor weather and climate.

June 2026

  • New blog post “Notes from a hot island” discussing communicating global warming and net zero.
  • Max presented a poster at the 11th National Climate Dynamics Workshop at the University of Reading, entitled “Identifying Ocean Memory Modes in North Atlantic Seasonal Forecasts with Machine Learning”. It was also announced that we will host next year’s UK Climate Dynamics Workshop here in St Andrews (details to follow)!
  • Congratulations to PhD student Thomas Breitburd for passing his first year annual review! Thomas is working on using machine learning to generate synthetic ensembles of compound extremes, supervised by Ioana Colfescu, Jean Reinaud, Chen Lu and me.
  • I spent the week at Uppsala University visiting Gabriele Messori and working on understanding weather regime transitions. Stay tuned for updates, and thanks for hosting me, Gabriele!

May 2026

  • I was interviewed for a short biographical piece in the University’s Staff News.
  • We hosted Tim Woollings, Ken Mylne, Hannah Bloomfield and Chris White for our School’s annual symposium “FRESH”, this year with the theme “From dynamics to impacts: Weather in a warming world”. Thanks for visiting us and giving such great talks!
  • Congratulations to PhD student Max Jackson for passing his first year annual review! Max is investigating atmosphere–ocean coupling and its impact on the NAO with machine learning, co-supervised by Jean Reinaud and Matt Patterson.
  • Congratulations to PhD student Freya Gibbon for passing her first year annual review! Freya is investigating the dynamics of Southern Hemisphere westerly winds and their impact on the ocean circulation in a range of model simulations with Graeme MacGilchrist, Mike Byrne and me.
  • EGU week! Thomas has a poster on Wednesday morning and I’m presenting a talk on Thursday afternoon in CL4.2.

April 2026

  • I gave a short talk on the relationship between the polar vortex and US cold air outbreaks in this month’s Climate Central webinar, which you can watch on YouTube.
  • Using ECMWF IFS data, I’ve implemented a North Atlantic weather regime classification following the same method we introduced for North America, yielding NAO+, Atlantic Ridge, NAO– and Scandinavian Blocking (plus No Regime = nearer climatology than any regime). This isn’t the same as what ECMWF use operationally, so it will be interesting to compare differences.

March 2026

  • Yu-Chiao Liang visited us from National Taiwan University as part of our joint seed funding project, and gave a seminar entitled “Polar Amplification and the Climate Regime Transition in High-latitude: a Model Hierarchy Perspective“. Thanks for visiting, Yu-Chiao!

February 2026

  • Delighted to say I’ve been elected as a Fellow of the Royal Meteorological Society (FRMetS) “in recognition of substantial contributions to meteorology in research and development, public education and outreach, services to RMetS, teaching and publications”.

January 2026

  • Short article published in the January APARC Newsletter on a new SNAP project I’m leading on seasonal forecasts and the stratosphere https://aparc-climate.org/newsletter
  • I gave a talk at the RMetS Scottish Local Centre in Edinburgh on stratospheric influences on surface weather and climate. You can watch the recording on the RMetS YouTube channel.
  • New paper with Lorenzo Polvani (Columbia) investigating summertime Greenland High regime trends published in GRL!
  • Plots showing the stratospheric wave reflection index in daily subseasonal ECMWF IFS forecasts added.
  • Updated North American weather regimes dataset for 1979–2025 published on Zenodo https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18174360. Plots of the Weather Regime Index on this website also updated!

2025

December 2025

  • St Andrews hosted a two-day workshop on “Connecting expertise in climate science across Scotland”, where I presented our work on recent regime trends.
  • I signed off as Co-Editor-in-Chief of Weather after 5 years and 3 months, handing over to Ben Maybee. I’ve written a short Editorial in the December issue.

November 2025

  • Our project “Developing an evidence basis for wind-driven public garden closures” was awarded funding by the University’s Impact fund.
  • I was quoted in The Washington Post regarding forecasts of a potentially record-early SSW.

October 2025

  • I featured in this week’s edition of the University’s Research Spotlight.
  • Victoria Sinclair (University of Helsinki) visited us this week, and gave a seminar on “Response of the Northern Hemisphere circulation to future changes in sea surface temperature and sea ice cover”. Thanks for visiting, Victoria!
  • New PhD project through the Iapetus DTP now online! If you’re interested, please get in touch.
  • I spoke to the Daily Mail (online) about the upcoming seasonal forecast.
  • More comments from me on air pressure influencing the boiling point of water and impact on tea picked up by the Daily Mail (online).
  • I spoke to BBC Radio Scotland about Storm Amy (and its extremely low pressure perhaps contributing to substandard Friday night cups of tea in the northwest!). Also picked up in this BBC News article and here about the effect on tea!

September 2025

  • New PhD students Thomas Breitburd and Maxwell Jackson joined us as co-advisees, with lead supervision from Ioana Colfescu as part of NCAS St Andrews. Welcome, Thomas and Max!
  • New PhD student Freya Gibbon joined us, working with Graeme MacGilchrist, Mike Byrne and myself on atmosphere–ocean dynamics in the Southern Ocean. Welcome, Freya!
  • I visited National Taiwan University and the Taiwan Central Weather Administration last week, along with NCAS St Andrews lead Ioana Colfescu, as part of our joint seed funding project with Yu-Chiao Liang at NTU.

August 2025

  • The BAMS State of the Climate in 2024 report was published – I contributed to a section on the Arctic atmosphere (led by Amy Butler, NOAA) in Chapter 5
  • New paper led by Robert Lee (Reading) published in GRL, investigating the weather regime response to the 2018 and 2019 SSWs using data from the SNAPSI experiments.
  • I spoke to BBC Radio Scotland about Storm Floris.

July 2025

  • A busy couple of weeks as I attended the RMetS Annual Weather and Climate conference in Manchester, followed by the UK Climate Dynamics workshop at the Met Office, where I presented our work on the response of the NAO to CO2 forcing.
  • Shih-Ni Zhou, a research student from National Taiwan University, finished her 3-week visit to St Andrews, working with me and Ioana Colfescu supported by our joint grant from NTU and St Andrews. Thanks for visiting and for your really interesting work on SSWs, Shih-Ni!

May 2025

  • Kanzis Mattu (PhD student at Strathclyde) visited us and gave a seminar in to the COASt group. Thanks for visiting, Kanzis!
  • New paper led by Michael Schutte (PhD student at Uppsala) on the dynamics of stratospheric wave reflection events over the North Pacific published in WCD.
  • I wrote an article with Matt Patterson in The Conversation on this year’s unusually dry and sunny spring in the UK.
  • New paper led by Ivan Mitevski (Princeton) on the response of the NAO to CO2 published in npj Climate and Atmospheric Science.

April 2025

  • North American year-round weather regime archive updated through 2024.
  • North Atlantic wintertime weather regime archive updated through winter 2024/25.
  • NAM plot archive updated through 2023/24 and extended back to 1940.
  • North American weather regime forecast updates now automated and occurring daily after 0800 UK time.

March 2025

  • I attended the QSQ workshop in Cambridge, presenting work on NAM biases and initiating a new SNAP project analysing seasonal models.

February 2025

  • The second SNAP subseasonal biases paper, led by Chaim Garfinkel, was published in WCD
  • I visited the University of Edinburgh and gave the Global Change Seminar on NAM biases.

January 2025

  • I visited the University of Exeter to give a seminar on our work on NAM biases in climate models.
  • New paper led by Jaewon Lee (PhD student at Columbia) on stratosphere–troposphere ozone transport published in GRL
  • Yu-Chiao Liang (NTU) visited us to kickstart our recently-awarded seed funding project between NTU and St Andrews.

2024

December 2024

September 2024

  • I gave an invited talk on “The global climate: where we are, where we’re going, and what that means” at a greenwashing risk roundtable dinner at Stephenson Harwood LLP, London.

August 2024

  • I spoke to New Scientist about the ongoing Antarctic stratospheric polar vortex disruption.
  • New paper with Lorenzo Polvani examining NAM biases in seasonal climate models published in QJRMS

July 2024

  • New article published in The Conversation with Hayley Fowler and Paul Davies on understanding extremes in a changing climate.
  • Preprint of a new paper led by Michael Schutte (PhD student in Uppsala) on the dynamics of stratospheric wave reflection over the North Pacific, is now online on egusphere https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2024-2240.
  • I spoke to The i newspaper regarding the statistics for summer 2024 in the UK so far, and whether it’s really been as wet as some headlines have suggested
  • Our paper, “Modulation of U.S. tornado activity by year-round North American weather regimes” (led by Mike Tippett with Kelsey Malloy), has now been published online in MWR.
  • I started my faculty position as Lecturer in Atmospheric Science in the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of St Andrews, Scotland!