Laurence Hawker, Dann Mitchell and Natalie Lord

Laurence Hawker is a Senior Research Associate in the School of Geographical Sciences at the University of Bristol. His work focuses on developing flood models, supporting disaster response and developing elevation and population datasets. Currently, I work on a number of projects developing and improving hydrodynamic models in data-sparse regions, namely in Africa (with a focus on Congo Basin and Mozambique) and Vietnam. Recently, along with several co-authors, I have published a 30m resolution global map of elevation with forests and buildings removed called FABDEM. In my research I use remote sensing, hydrodynamic models and work closely in an interdisciplinary team to develop a household survey. In my PhD I worked on an intermediate scale flood model of the Mekong Delta, quantifying river-floodplain connectivity and the simulation of plausible versions of global digital elevation models (DEM) in floodplains. Dann Mitchell is a Alan Turing fellow, a NERC fellow, and Professor of Climate Science at the University of Bristol. He is the Met Office co-chair in climate hazards, co-lead of the Cabot Institute for the Environment ‘Environmental Change’ theme, and the head of the Climate Dynamics group. He moved to Bristol in 2017 after a five-year research post in the Department of Physics at the University of Oxford. Since completing his PhD in 2011 in the world-famous meteorology department of the University of Reading, Mitchell has published over 90 peer-reviewed papers, with a strong focus on climate extremes, hazards, and impacts; especially related to health. He is co-founder and coordinator of the Half a Degree additional warming, Prognosis and Projected Impacts (HAPPI) consortium, which is aimed at understanding climate variability under the Paris Agreement climate goals. 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).