Francesca Morris

I am an early-career postdoctoral researcher who started working in the Climate Systems cluster of SoGE in July 2023. My research interests cover monsoons, convective organisation, thunderstorms and their dynamics, tropical and subtropical meteorology, tropical-extratropical interactions, satellite observations, and more!

During my undergraduate physics degree, I discovered a passion for fluid dynamics which led to me to study atmospheric physics. As a result, over the course of my career my research has largely focused on thunderstorms and their interactions with the atmosphere around them. This began with a Masters research project investigating above-anvil cirrus plumes in mesoscale convective systems (MCSs) in the USA, supervised by Dr Simon Proud in the Atmospheric, Oceanic and Planetary Physics subdepartment's Earth Observation Data Group. I continued to study MCSs in my PhD in tropical meteorology at the University of Leeds under the supervision of Dr Juliane Schwendike, Prof Doug Parker, and Dr Caroline Bain (UK Met Office), with a thesis title of "Scale interactions of mesoscale convection over West Africa."

During my PhD I was given the opportunity to study MCSs in Southeast Asia as part of WCSSP Southeast Asia's 'SPISEA' project, where I investigated the effects of equatorial waves on modulating MCSs. Another fantastic opportunity for hands-on experience with convection came in the form of participating in the Deep Convective Microphysics EXperiment (DCMEX) field campaign, flying on the FAAM aircraft in New Mexico.

More recently, I have moved from the western African meteorology of my PhD topic to a new project focusing on the meteorology of southern Africa instead as I have started my postdoctoral position in the School of Geography and the Environment.

Currently I am a postdoctoral research assistant on the First Rains project led by Neil Hart, working alongside Marcia Zilli. First Rains aims to explore prediction of monsoon onset over southern Africa. Climate projections indicate that southern African monsoon onset is likely to be delayed, and seasonal forecasting of the arrival of the rains is a long-standing challenge, especially due to the lack of literature on the southern African monsoon. However, forecasting monsoon onset and the characteristics of the monsoon season is essential for the agricultural and water industries in the region, as well as for predicting extremes that affect the lives of all who live there.

My role in the project is to lead the running of high-resolution convective scale climate models over southern Africa using the Met Office UM. By running ensemble simulations of the monsoon onset season, we can aim to quantify the predictability of the monsoon seasons and determine the extent to which convection-permitting models can add value to subseasonal-to-seasonal prediction. We also hope to run some idealised simulations to diagnose some of the drivers of intraseasonal variation in monsoon onset.

During my PhD at Leeds University, I thoroughly enjoyed participating in teaching and supervision of undergraduate and masters-level students. I had the opportunity to teach mathematics and programming to classes of geologists, geophysicists, environmental scientists, and geographers, as well as marking their coursework. In addition, I taught introductory meteorology classes to students from disciplines across the university and was invited to give a guest lecture in the course lecture series. Based on my teaching practice, I was awarded an Associate Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy (AFHEA) and published an article in the Journal of PGR Pedagogic Practice (JPPP) about the role of near-peer teaching assistants in undergraduate education.