The Group
Our group collaborates with colleagues across Exeter's Earth
Systems Science and Geography disciplines, the Met Office
Hadley Centre and the Centre for Environment, Fisheries and
Aquaculture Science
Dr Paul Halloran (Group Leader)
Paul’s primary
research interests focus on understanding the role of the
marine carbon cycle within the Earth system. His
multi-disciplinary background allows this to be tacked in a
novel way. Paul’s degree and PhD were in the Department of
Earth Sciences in Oxford, where working with Ros Rickaby, he
examined ENSO change over the Pliocene, developed novel
geochemical climate proxy techniques, and investigated the
impact of ocean acidification on calcifying phytoplankton.
After his PhD Paul moved to the Met Office Hadley Centre as a
scientist, then senior scientist in ocean biogeochemical
modeling. In the Hadley Centre Paul was heavily involved in
the development, validation and application of the Earth
System Model HadGEM2-ES. Working with this model, Paul and
colleagues investigated the mechanisms behind novel
biogeochemical climate feedbacks, the role of anthropogenic
aerosols in recent climate change, reversibility in the earth
system and more. In 2013 Paul took up a lectureship in the
School of Geography, University of Exeter, becoming a senior
lecturer in 2016, where he is working to unite past and future
climate research to help improve our understanding of the
Earth system.
Beatriz Arellano Nava (PhD Student)
Beatriz is working on the EU Horizon2020 project COMFORT. Beatriz is looking at and developing mechanistic understanding of tipping points in our coastal oceans using historical observations and recent, high resolution paleoclimate data.
Sarah Holmes (PhD Student)
Sarah has
just accepted a NERC CASE (with Cefas) funded PhD studentship
to work on an exciting project which will bring together
annually resolved palaeoclimate reconstructions from bivalves
with shelf-sea modelling. The project aims to deliver new
understanding about the climate drivers of ecosystem change in
the North West European shelf seas. Sarah's undergraduate
dissertation project, based in Exeter, but working closely
with colleagues in Bangor, produced a novel 99 year Glycymeris glycymeris
chronology from the English Channel.
Jen McWhorter (PhD student)
Jen
is a PhD student with an Exeter-Queensland scholarship
(supervised by Pete Mumby in Queensland) to work on
downscaling global climate and biogeochemical model data to
the coastal ocean to drive novel coral reef projections.
George Manville (PhD Student)
We
have recently appointed a PhD student to work on Southern
Ocean marine trace gasses and climate, joint with the Met
Office.
Co-supervised Students:
Gen Hinde
Gen is a NERC GW4+ funded PhD
student working on a PhD led by Dr Marie-Jose Messias and the
ocean tracers team. Her project will use transient tracers
observations to investigate the uptake of heat and CO2 by the
Southern Ocean.
Gen graduated with an MSci Oceanography from the University of
Southampton in 2017 with a year spent abroad at the University
of Washington, Seattle. Whilst in Seattle she took part in a
student research cruise to Vancouver Island and collected data
within Nootka Sound, a fjord system. She used this data to
produce a thesis looking at the influence of coastal upwelling
on the surface CO2 flux within the fjords. Once back in
Southampton Gen completed her final year project looking at
methods to detect subsurface meltwater outflows from Antarctic
ice shelves.
Aimee Coggins
Aimee
is a Royal Society funded PhD student working on the Southern
Ocean carbon cycle, lead supervisor Andy Watson.
Alumni:
Beth Langley (MbyRes) was working with us on a new method to isolate coccosphere from sediment. Beth moved to PhD in Glaswgow: with Nick Kamenos ( https://www.iapetus2.ac.uk/studentships/arctic-blue-carbon-human-and-climatic-drivers-of-change/)
Freya Garry (PDRA) was working between Exeter and the Met Office on the NERC funded CLAM (Climate of the Last Millennium) project. Freya will be analysis CMIP5 simulations and performing new HadGEM3 simulations to test hypotheses of the drivers of decadal and longer Atlantic surface circulation variability, and by doing so understand exciting new annually resolved seawater temperature and salinity reconstructions spanning the last millenium. Freya has moved to a permanent position at the Met Office.
Alice Lebehot (Lead supervison, Paul Halloran, co-supervisors, Andy Watson, Doug McNeall, Ute Schuster). Moved to Capetown to work with Pedro Monteiro. Alice worked on the RAGNARoCC project. Her work aims to understand how, and how well, Earth System models simulate observed North Atlantic pCO2 variability, to help constrain our confidence in model projections of future CO2 uptake. Numerous observational campaigns and data from ships of opportunity over the past two decades have lead to the suggestion that modes of climate variability (NAO and AMO) dominate recent N. Atlantic air-sea CO2 flux changes (Thomas et al, 2008, Watson et al, 2009). Links between air-sea CO2 flux and the NAO and AMO, if robust, are extremely valuable because they allow mechanisms for changing CO2 uptake, verified in the real world, to be considered in the context of past and future natural and anthropogenic forcing. As promising as these relationships may seem, the observational CO2 air-sea flux record spans less that one full cycle of the NAO‘s, and less than half a cycle of the AMO’s multi-decadal variability, and therefore our confidence in these relationships is very limited. We must therefore look to carefully validated models to extend our observational understanding and place observed changes in a future context. Alice also worked with us for 6 months on the NERC CURBCO2 project.
Lester Kwiatkowski (Lead supervisor, Peter Cox). Moved to work as PDRA in Stanford with Ken Caldera and is now at IPSL working with Laurent Bopp in France.
Matthew Couldrey (Lead supervisor, Kevin Oliver, Southampton). Moved to work as PDRA with Jonathan Gregory in Reading.
Tobia Tudino. Tobia
completed a 6 month contract with us after his PhD to work on
the CurbCO2 project.