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Kaitlin Alexander

PhD Candidate, Climate Change Research Centre, UNSW; ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science, UNSW Sydney

Kaitlin began her PhD in August 2014, with supervisors Katrin Meissner, Matthew England, and Ben Galton-Fenzi (ACE CRC, Hobart). Her research focuses on modelling sub-ice shelf circulation in the Southern Ocean and how it may respond to climate change. She is particularly interested in warm offshore Circumpolar Deep Water and how it is transported onto the Antarctic continental shelf. To investigate these processes she is using two ocean / sea ice / ice shelf models: ROMS (Regional Ocean Modelling System) and FESOM (Finite Element Sea-ice Ocean Model).

Kaitlin has previously studied the software architecture of climate models (with Steve Easterbrook at the University of Toronto), projections of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation in a warming world (Andrew Weaver, University of Victoria), and the role of Atlantic circulation changes in the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (Katrin Meissner, UNSW). She graduated from the University of Manitoba in 2014 with a B.Sc. Honours in Mathematics; for her honours thesis, she derived a simplified model of ocean circulation.