Ana Silva Tavares

Uncovering Subseasonal Drivers of Atlantic Tropical Cyclone Activity

Ana is a PhD student at the University of Oxford on the Environmental Research Doctoral Training Programme, with her research funded by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC). She is part of the Hydro-Climate Extremes research group in the School of Geography and the Environment, led by Professor Louise Slater. She is also co-supervised by Dr Katherine Kowal, and collaborates closely with Professor Ben Kirtman, whom she is currently visiting at the Cooperative Institute of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences in Miami.

Ana has an interdisciplinary background, holding a BEng in Aerospace Engineering from Brunel University London and an MSc in Applied Data Science and Statistics from the University of Exeter. Her transition into this field was inspired by her desire to apply her knowledge of fluid dynamics and thermodynamics to the (much cooler) challenges of Earth System predictability!

Ana's research focuses on exploring the role that extratropical-tropical interactions play in the variability of subseasonal tropical cyclone (TC) activity in the Atlantic through data analysis and modelling experiments. She believes that a better understanding of the factors modulating TC activity beyond tropical forcing is essential to enhance current subseasonal predictive skill. In the future, she hopes to apply ML and XAI techniques to identify potential teleconnections and windows of opportunities.

• Subseasonal Predictability & Variability
• Subseasonal-to-Seasonal Prediction
• Explainable and Interpretable Machine Learning for Weather and Climate
• Tropical-Extratropical Teleconnections
• Tropical Cyclones
• Windows of Opportunity