Date/Time: Tuesday 14 March 2023, 5.30pm

Venue: Curtis Auditorium, Herschel Building, Newcastle University

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All our events remain free and open to all, but pre-booking is required. Bookings for this lecture will open at 10.00am on 7 March. To reserve your place click the booking link below or telephone our booking voicemail line 0191 208 6136.

Hosted by Professor Hayley Fowler

Weather can be a matter of life and death on Mount Everest, yet forecast performance is unknown due to a lack of observations. It is a data gap that has also hindered understanding of how this lofty frontier is responding to climate warming. Efforts are being made to address that, as insights are shared from a new weather station network that extends to the highest reaches of this iconic mountain. 

Biography

Tom now holds the position of Senior Lecturer in Environmental Geography at King’s College London. His research career began, though, with a PhD in glacier-climate interactions in 2013. Tom then spent the best part of the next decade researching the planet’s most extreme weather and its impacts on society, with his most substantial contributions coming in the study of deadly heat waves. His interests in glaciers and extreme weather intersected in 2019 when he was asked to co-lead the meteorology component of the National Geographic and Rolex Perpetual Planet Everest Expedition. The team went on to break numerous Guinness world records, including for establishing the highest weather station in the world at 8,430 m a.s.l. In 2022 Tom was back on Mt Everest as the team installed a new weather station at the highest point possible on the Nepalese side of the mountain, just below the summit at 8810 m a.s.l. Tom’s research is now working with these frontier data to understand how the precarious snow and ice resources stored at extreme altitude may respond to climate change.