Hannah Christensen

Hannah tutors Mathematical Methods to first year Wadham physics undergraduates. This covers foundational topics including vector calculus, differential equations, and complex numbers.

In the department, she lectures the first-year course on Normal Modes and Waves and the second/third year short option on Chaos theory. She aims to include as many physics demonstrations as reasonably possible in her lectures, and recently bought a 2.5m long, 25kg wave machine, which Wadham students get to play with after the lectures.

Hannah leads the Atmospheric Processes group in the Department of Physics.

To predict the weather next week or the climate next century, we build computer simulators of the Earth system – the atmosphere, the oceans, the land surface and more. These simulators encode our physical understanding of the key processes at work. To prepare for hazardous weather or changing risks due to climate change, we need predictions which accurately capture the chance of extreme events. To improve our predictions, we must improve our computer simulators. To improve our computer simulators, we must first improve our knowledge.

Hannah and her group work across this whole pipeline. They use theory and data to develop an improved understanding of the atmosphere. They then use this new-found understanding to improve computer simulators of the atmosphere, to get better predictions from days to decades. Finally, they collaborate with users of weather and climate data, such as the National Energy System Operator, to ensure best-use of the resultant predictions.

Hannah was recently awarded the Clarence Leroy Meisinger award by the American Meteorological Society “for fundamental research and leadership in understanding and quantifying forecast uncertainty in weather and climate models”, and the International Association of Meteorology and Atmospheric Sciences (IAMAS) Early Career Scientist medal for “tackling the hardest problems in meteorology by applying the most fundamental underlying physics.”

Before joining Wadham, Hannah was a Natural Environment Research Council Independent Research Fellow in the Oxford Physics Department and a lecturer at Corpus Christi College. She has also spent time in Boulder, Colorado, where she was an Advanced Study Program Fellow at the National Center for Atmospheric Research.