A big thank you to Live Here Love Here for inviting me to share my story of how my love for the outdoors has helped steer my career choices.
My name is Erin and I grew up in County Down, where I was a stone's throw away from beautiful beaches, enchanting forests and the magical Mourne Mountains. As a child, I remember how vast and mysterious these all seemed to me and quickly fell in love with all the great outdoors had to offer. As I grew older, I became curious about the workings of the environment; how do rivers chose their course, how and why cliffs fall into the sea, how does the land changes over time etc? Some questions were answered in my school Geography classes but now I knew that I wanted to understand and learn as much as I could about the place we all call home. This paved the way for me to complete an Environmental Science degree at Ulster University, following which, I began my journey as a PhD student at the University of Bristol in 2018 and that is where I am now.
Over time I became more and more aware of the many problems facing our environment, mostly as a result of human activity. Unfortunately, you only need to go a few steps outside your front door before you come across a piece of litter. The more I saw how we can change and impact the environment both positively and negatively, the more I wanted to understand the bigger picture. This is what really drove me to investigating more about how climate change will impact our great outdoors and our daily lives. What will our coastline look like as sea levels continue to rise? Will our cliffs erode faster? How will our wildlife adapt to reduced or changing habitats? Will we have more or less rain, snow, heatwaves and storms? What does this mean for our food market?
These are all huge and rather complex questions, and could not be answered in one PhD. So, I chose to focus my research on understanding how climate change will impact future extreme storms hitting the UK. I have always loved watching the clouds in the sky and seeing the dark looming clouds approach before the heavens open. However, in reality my research is less looking up at the sky but more using climate models and supercomputers to calculate complex mathematical equations. By using these supercomputers, I am able to simulate what future storms might look like at the end of the next century in terms of their intensity, frequency and duration. Once completed, this research will help to paint a small piece of the bigger picture of how climate change could change our extreme weather which we already know can have severe impacts on our lives.
There is still plenty of research to be done, as there are various and numerous interconnecting components at play and a great deal that we have yet to understand. Although, one thing that I do know is that we should take great pride in our environment and appreciate all the outdoors has to offer by looking after it. Be it a walk on the beach, a swim in the sea, a hike up the mountains or a dander round the garden, the great outdoors will be sure to give you a sense of peace, wonder and maybe even prompt you to learn more about yourself, our world and our universe. After all, it's just a stone's throw away.
If you would like to know more about the scientific research that I am part of in Bristol, feel free to check out our group website: https://www.climatebristol.org/ . If you would like to find out more about my specific scientific research on storms, feel free to read my recently published paper which is free to access here: https://doi.org/10.1002/wea.3861
If you are interested in living sustainably and prefer to read blogs than science papers then check out my blog posts at https://renewableewe.wordpress.com/