School of Geography and the Environment

Ellen is a climate scientist in the who specialises in African climate systems and joined SoGE at the University of Oxford in 2016. Her current work focuses on understanding historical climate and future projections in models for Ethiopia and Kenya as part of the REACH project. She is also interested in how climate information is communicated and disseminated and is leading a study on climate information flows in the Awash Basin, Ethiopia. Ellen has also been a research associate on the LaunchPAD project (https://launchpad6.home.blog) to build a set of model evaluation diagnostics for Africa. With LaunchPAD, she has been a mentor and collaborator for early career research fellows at four African universities creating diagnostic metrics for global climate models. Previously, her work has used modelling experiments to examine the influence of the Indian Ocean on rainfall in the Sahel, and rainfall moisture sources and water isotopes in vapour in the Congo Basin.

Ellen's interests include understanding challenges in using climate information in Africa - from difficulties in capturing physical processes in models to the confidence users have in information at a local scale and everything in between. Ellen completed her PhD in Atmospheric Physics from the University of Toronto in 2016. She has a background in Physics and African Studies.

For the full list of Ellen's publications, please see her ORCiD profile.

Journal Articles

• Armstrong, A., Dyer, E., Koehler, J. and Hope, R. (2022) Intra-seasonal rainfall and piped water revenue variability in rural Africa. Global Environmental Change, 76. 102592.
• Bussi, G., Whitehead, P.G., Jin, L., Taye, M.T., Dyer, E., Hirpa, F.A., Yimer, Y.A. and Charles, K.J. (2021) Impacts of Climate Change and Population Growth on River Nutrient Loads in a Data Scarce Region: The Upper Awash River (Ethiopia). Sustainability, 13(3). 1254.
• Grasham, C.F., Calow, R., Casey, V., Charles, K.J., de Wit, S., Dyer, E., Fullwood-Thomas, J., Hirons, M., Hope, R., Hoque, S.F., Jepson, W., Korzenevica, M., Murphy, R., Plastow, J., Ross, I., Ruiz-Apilánez, I., Schipper, E.L.F., Trevor, J., Walmsley, N. and Zaidi, H. (2021) Engaging with the politics of climate resilience towards clean water and sanitation for all. npj Clean Water, 4(42).
• Peng, J., Dadson, S., Hirpa, F., Dyer, E., Lees, T., Miralles, D.G., Vicente-Serrano, S.M. and Funk, C. (2020) A pan-African high-resolution drought index dataset. Earth System Science Data, 12(1): 753-769.
• Taye, M.T., Dyer, E., Charles, K.J. and Hirons, L.C. (2020) Potential predictability of the Ethiopian summer rains: understanding local variations and their implications for water management decisions. Science of The Total Environment. 142604.
• Hirpa, F., Alfieri, L., Lees, T., Peng, J., Dyer, E. and Dadson, S. (2019) Streamflow response to climate change in the Greater Horn of Africa. Climatic Change, 156: 341-363.
• Hirpa, F.A., Dyer, E., Hope, R., Olago, D.O. and Dadson, S.J. (2018) Finding sustainable water futures in data-sparse regions under climate change: Insights from the Turkwel River basin, Kenya. Journal of Hydrology: Regional Studies, 19: 124-135.

Reports

• Murgatroyd, A., Charles, K.J., Chautard, A., Dyer, E., Grasham, C., Hope, R., Hoque, S.F., Korzenevica, M., Munday, C., Alvarez-Sala, J., Dadson, S., Hall, J.W., Kebede, S., Nileshwar, A., Olago, D., Salehin, M., Ward, F., Washington, R., Yeo, D. and Zeleke, G. (2021) Water Security for Climate Resilience Report. University of Oxford: REACH, UK.

Conference Papers

• Dyer, E., Washington, R., Ouma, G. and King, J.A. (2018) East African long rains at the sub-seasonal scale: connections with regional and large-scale climate. Geophysical Research Abstracts, 20 ref. EGU2018-16293.
• King, J.A., Washington, R., Dyer, E. and Engelstaedter, S. (2018) Representation of East African Rainfall in CMIP5 Models. Geophysical Research Abstracts, 20 ref. EGU2018-6659.