Nicholas Leach

I am a postdoctoral researcher at Oxford University, having recently completed my PhD as part of the Environmental Research Doctoral Training Partnership there. I reside in the Predictability of Weather and Climate research group, supervised by Antje Weisheimer and Myles Allen. My research explores the use of operational weather forecasting models within the field of extreme event attribution, with a particular focus on heat events and storms. This work touches on themes of numerical weather prediction, attribution of climate change, meteorological drivers of extreme weather and extreme value statistics.

I started out in climate change research during a summer research project (that I would later develop into my masters thesis) investigating a simple method for estimating the remaining global carbon budget. While this particular field is no longer my focus, I still remain involved, especially in the use and development of reduced complexity climate models.

I am also a climate scientist at Climate X, specialising in the quantifying the impact of climate change on storm systems globally. My role involves both assessing how to apply state-of-the art academic research to provide the detailed information on climate risk required by the financial industry, and coming up with novel ways that can improve upon more traditional ways of quantifying extreme weather risk from storm systems. I combine a variety of statistical methods and models with observational data and state-of-the-art physical climate and weather model simulations in my work, and am always interested in new approaches in this space, so if you’re an academic researching physical extreme weather risk and interested in working with industry, please get in touch!