Nicholas Leach

I studied an undergraduate integrated masters course in Physics at Oxford, from 2014-18; graduating with a first class MPhys degree. During my undergraduate degree I was awarded academic and Lord Crewe Scholarships by Lincoln College. Between my third and fourth years over the summer, I worked as a research intern at the Environmental Change Institute with Myles Allen. Here, the main project I was involved in was working on incorporating additional greenhouse gases into a pre-existing simple climate model. Towards the end of the internship, I started work on the project that would go on to become my masters project, on simple methods to constrain the carbon budget based on current observations of global temperature anomaly. Further work during completion of my masters project went on to become the basis for a Nature Geoscience article.

I am interested in looking into novel methodologies for attribution of extreme events, with a focus on improving the reliability of statements made, as well as the models involved in making such statements. I would like to start by looking at the reliability of hindcast coupled climate simulations, and observing the impact reliability calibration techniques have on attribution statements that can be made. In the future, I would like to do some more work on the potential impacts of climate change through event attribution, and discuss the associated policy relevance of the research.

 

While I am going into attribution of climate change for my D.Phil., I am involved in the FABLE Project, and therefore also interested in food system and land use change for a sustainable future, and how the agriculture- and associated- industries will have to adapt in the future to mitigate their negative effects on the environment.

S. Jenkins, R. J. Millar, N. Leach & M. R. Allen (2018). "Framing Climate Goals in Terms of Cumulative CO2-Forcing-Equivalent Emissions" Geophysical Research Letters 45(6) 2795-2804. https://doi.org/10.1002/2017GL076173

Nicholas J. Leach, Richard J. Millar, Karsten Haustein, Stuart Jenkins, Euan Graham & Myles R. Allen (2018). "Current level and rate of warming determine emissions budgets under ambitious mitigation" Nature Geoscience 11(8) 574-579. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-018-0156-y

Christopher J. Smith, Piers M. Forster, Myles Allen, Nicholas Leach, Richard J. Millar, Giovanni A. Passerello, and Leighton A. Regayre (2018). "FAIR v1.3: a simple emissions-based impulse response and carbon cycle model" Geoscientific Model Development 11 2273-2297. https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-11-2273-2018