Higher-dimensional structure in weather data
- Supervisor: Dr Nina Otter (Maths)
- Funding: Queen Mary Principal's Studentship
- Deadline: 21st February 2022
The folllowing fully-funded PhD studentship is available with an expected start date of September 2022. The studentship will be held in the School of Mathematical Sciences.
Project description
The North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) is an atmospheric pattern that describes winter weather in eastern North America and Europe. Prolonged anomalies in such patterns are often linked to extreme weather events, and understanding the variations behind the NAO is an important problem in the context of global climate change.
The aim of this project is to use techniques stemming from the field of topological data analysis (TDA), to shed new light onto the NAO. Traditional techniques used by climate scientists rely on parameter choices taken during pre-processing steps, which make it difficult to obtain results that one can interpret and reproduce. Methods from TDA can help in obtaining global summaries of patterns in data, in a way that is robust to perturbations of the input data, and allows to account for different parameter choices, such as the density of the points, or the resolution scale at which one studies the data set.
This project will have a wide potential impact for climate science, as well as TDA, since it will require the student to tackle known algorithmic and computational challenges in TDA; many of the techniques from TDA have known computational cost because they require large amounts of computing memory, therefore, a significant part of this project will be devoted to developing efficient algorithms and implementations thereof.
Funding
This studentship is funded by QMUL. It will cover tuition fees, and provide an annual tax-free maintenance allowance for 3 years at the Research Council rate (£17,609 in 2021/22).
The project is open to UK and international students. The higher fees for international students (including EU) may be covered for up to 2 candidates applying for the Queen Mary Principal's PhD Studentships: Environment, Biodiversity and Genomics.
Eligibility and applying
Applications are invited from outstanding candidates with either a strong background in algebraic topology, or in unsupervised learning and related fields. A masters degree is desirable, but not essential.
Applicants from outside of the UK are required to provide evidence of their English language ability. Please see our English language requirements page for details.
Informal enquiries about the project can be sent to Dr Nina Otter (n.otter@qmul.ac.uk). Formal applications must be submitted through our online form by the stated deadline including a CV, personal statement and qualifications.