Natalie Lord

Natalie Lord is a climate scientist with an interest in how global, regional, and local climates respond to changes over different timescales, along with the potential impacts of these changes on the environment and society. Her current focus is understanding how the climate system may change in the future, what impacts these changes may have on flood risk and tropical cyclones, and how this will affect populations around the world.

She holds an Honorary Research Associate position in the School of Geographical Sciences at the University of Bristol, where she also completed her PhD and several research positions. She has been involved in a variety of research, including modelling changes in high temperature-high humidity extremes over the next century and the potential impacts, and comparing how tropical cyclones are represented in climate models with different spatial scales.

Her PhD and a subsequent research position were funded by and carried out in connection with various nuclear industry companies, including RWM (UK), Posiva Oy (Finland), and Svensk Karnbranslehantering AB (SKB; Sweden), and National Cooperative for the Disposal of Radioactive Waste (Nagra; Switzerland). The climate projections for the next million years produced as part of her postdoctoral research will be used by the Finnish and Swedish nuclear waste authorities (Posiva Oy and SKB) as an integral part of the Safety Cases for their high-level radioactive waste repositories located at Olkiluoto and Forsmark.

The methodology and models developed during her PhD, and the subsequent projections of climate evolution over the next million years, contributed to the report "Development of a Common Framework for Addressing Climate Change in Post-Closure Radiological Assessment of Solid Radioactive Waste Disposal", written by Working Group 6 of the MOdelling and DAta for Radiological Impacts Assessments (MODARIA) international research programme, and published by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).