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.