Dr Ellen Dyer

Dr Dyer is a climate scientist specialising in African climate systems. Her work bridges physical and social science to understand climate variability, change and risk. From a physical perspective her work focuses on building an understanding of key processes driving variability and change in regional African climates. This includes investigating how atmospheric circulation features at local and regional scales influence rainfall variability in Ethiopia and Kenya and using isotopologues of water in vapour to understand moisture recycling and transport in the Congo Basin. From a social perspective her research emphasises the importance of learning from lived experiences of climate variability to inform more equitable and sustainable responses to climate extremes.

Her work also interrogates the processes and relationships that influence how climate information is created, communicated, and shared in practice as climate services. This involves understanding the difficulties in representing physical processes in models to the confidence users have in information at a local scale and everything in between.

Dr Dyer joined SoGE as a Postdoctoral Researcher in 2016 after completing her PhD in Atmospheric Physics at the University of Toronto. She has a background in Physics and African Studies.

• PALM-TREEs - A Pan-African and Transdisciplinary Lens on the Margins: Tackling the Risks of Extreme Events - (CLARE IDRC/FCDO, 2023-2026), Principal Investigator
• ClimateForAL – (British Academy, Evidence-Informed Policy Making Programme, 2025-2026), Co-Investigator
• Forests for Resilience (F4R) - (European Space Agency - EO Science for Society, 2025-2026), Research Scientist
• LaunchPAD - Priority on African Diagnostics - (FCDO, 2019-2021), Researcher and Research Coordinator
• REACH - Improving Water Security for the Poor (FCDO, 2015-2024), Postdoctoral Researcher

Current Graduate Research Students

Recent Graduate Research Students

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