My PhD thesis

You’ve all been asking for it, and now that my corrections have been completed, I’m allowed to upload my thesis! Here it is in all its gory glory:

To briefly (!) summarise, my thesis looked at how the weather in the stratosphere (between 10 and 50km up) interacts with the weather at the surface near the north pole. This is important because sometimes violent weather in the stratosphere happens in mid-winter and affects the weather in the mid-latitudes (so Europe and America) by bringing extremely cold temperatures. We know that this link exists, but not the physics of how it works. This is all detailed in chapter 2. In chapter 3 I put forward a new way of looking at this interaction, and derived a set of equations to describe how this new coupling index evolved. In chapters 4 and 5 I then tested this new theory rigorously, and found that the equations hold pretty well in the stratosphere, but not so well closer to the surface. The problem with the experiment overall was that the closer you got to the surface, one of the crucial tools used (the QGPV inverter) performed worse and worse, and so the results are less and less certain. While the conclusions are that the theory didn’t hold close to the surface, it’s not certain whether this is because the equations are wrong, or (as I suspect) because of that decreased performance of the inverter close to the surface. A repeat of the study with a more powerful computer and a more established inverter would yield some interesting results, though in my opinion the whole experiment is flawed from the beginning (see chapter 6).

If you want to see this thesis take shape, then you can watch every video I made during my PhD in this playlist!