Christine McKenna

Christine McKenna is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow working on the EU-funded CONSTRAIN project. In this project, she is looking at future projections of large-scale atmospheric circulation change, with the aim of constraining uncertainty in these projections.

Before coming to Leeds, McKenna studied for her PhD at the British Antarctic Survey and the University of Cambridge (DAMTP). This was under the supervision of Tom Bracegirdle, Peter Haynes, and Emily Shuckburgh. In her PhD research, she used an intermediate global circulation model, IGCM4, to look at how large-scale atmospheric circulation changes in response to future Arctic sea ice loss. In particular, she examined whether the response is sensitive to different regions or magnitudes of sea ice loss, and the relative roles played by tropospheric and stratospheric mechanisms. She also looked at the influence of atmospheric internal variability with regards to uncertainty in simulated atmospheric responses to sea-ice loss.