Steering Committee and work package leaders
Jeremy Ely
Jeremy Ely is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Sheffield, and is Principle Investigator of this project. Jeremy is interested in using glacial geomorphology and numerical modelling to understand the processes and flow of ice sheets.
Jeremy is leading the Deplete and Retreat project. He is also leading Work Package 3, focusing on glacier modelling.
Bethan Davies
Bethan Davies is a glaciologist at Newcastle University. She is interested in using observational and empirical data to help us understand how glaciers and climate interact.
Bethan is a co-investigator, leading Work Package 1, and supporting Jeremy in leading the project.
Wouter Buytaert
Wouter is a hydrologist based at Imperial College London. He works at the interface between hydrological process understanding, water resources engineering, and sustainable development. He has over 20 years of experience in the Andes, working on topics such as the impact of land-use change on river flows, climate change impacts, and nature-based solutions for water security. He also has a keen interest in participatory science, knowledge co-creation, and science – policy interactions.
Sihan Li
Sihan Li is a climate scientist at Universtiy of Sheffield. She is interested in using high-resolution regional climate model (in particular at convective-permitting scale) & hydrological model to understand regional climate change and impacts, especially hydrometerological changes and extreme weather/climate events.
Sihan is leading Work Package 2, focusing on climate modelling in the project.
Co-Investigators
Jonathan Carrivick
Jonathan’s research focuses on earth surface process and landforms in polar, arctic and alpine environments. In this project he will lead mapping and reconstructions of late Holocene glaciers across the Andes, examining their past extent and behaviour, for WP1.
Julie Jones
Julie is a climate scientist at the University of Sheffield. She is interested in understanding past changes in atmospheric circulation variability, using historical observations and climate model simulations, with a focus on the Southern Hemisphere.
She is contributing to the analysis of the regional climate model simulations in Work Package 2.
Tom Matthews
Tom’s research focuses on environments and events that are meteorologically extreme. The former has seen him work extensively in mountain regions, including in the Himalaya where he installed and manages the highest-altitude weather stations in the world on Mt. Everest.
Tom will bring this experience to DaR through helping install weather monitoring equipment in the target catchments (WP1). He will also assist with the stochastic modelling of extreme weather events (WP2).
Tamsin Edwards
Tamsin Edwards is a climate scientist specialising in quantifying the uncertainties of climate model predictions, particularly for the ice sheet and glacier contributions to sea level rise.
She will focus on data-model comparisons and evaluating model projections, and experimental design, in this project.
Robert McNabb
Bob McNabb is a glaciologist who spends most of his time looking at pictures of glaciers taken from satellites or airplanes, though he sometimes gets outside to look at glaciers in the wild.
Here, Bob will help lead the efforts to estimate glacier thickness, volume and mass changes using remote sensing and photogrammetric reconstruction in WP1.
Sarah Bradley
Sarah Bradley is a research associate at the university of Sheffield and will work on Work package 3. Sarah’s research investigates how the land moves and sea level changes as large regions of ice grew and retreated during the last ice age. She develops and applies glacial isostatic adjustment models (GIA) and more recently fully coupled global earth-system-ice sheet models to explore the interactions, processes and feedbacks between ice sheets, sea level and components of the climate system (atmosphere, land and ocean) over a range of time scales.
Alejandro Dussaillant
Engineering hydrologist with 25+ years experience in river and catchment science, with a focus on hydro-geomorphic processes, floods and droughts. He has led projects in Chilean Patagonia on glacial-lake outburst floods, gravel-bed rivers, and river-groundwater interactions. Currently a Senior Hydrologist at UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology with a role of facilitating Working with Natural Processes, leading projects on novel river monitoring methods and Nature-based Solutions, and collaborative research on lahar floods and Andean water towers as this project. Alejandro is Chilean-Italian, enjoys trekking, dancing and aikido among other interests.
Owen King
Owen King is a research associate at Newcastle University, focused on reconstructing past glacier change (WP1).
In D&R, Owen is leading the reconstruction of past glacier extent and volume across the Andes, as well as organising and leading field expeditions and installation of weather stations and glacier ablation stakes.
Emily Potter
Emily is a research fellow at the University of Sheffield, working with WP2. She runs climate models to understand climate processes over the Andes.
Tom Gribbin
Tom is a doctoral researcher investigating hydrological processes occurring downstream of ice margins in the Peruvian Andes. He is interested in using observational data to constrain hydrological models and improve our understanding of the important ‘off-ice’ water sources and cycling mechanisms. He is especially interested in the role of high-altitude wetlands in controlling water storage and release. Tom is based at the British Geological Survey in Nottingham.
Ethan Lee
Ethan is a PDRA based at Sheffield University from January 2024, focusing on numerical modelling of glaciers (WP 3). In D&R he will be leading the numerical modelling and evaluation of ensemble members against the observational datasets produced in WP 1.
Rike Becker
Rike is a passionate hydrologist and PDRA at Imperial College London. She wants to better understand how climate change alters hydrological processes and how these changes affect future water availability. To improve the understanding of these rapidly changing hydrodynamics, Rike likes to combine the use of hydrological models with in-situ and remote sensing data. Within the DaR project she will contribute to Work Package 4, which goal it is to find out how changes in glacier and snow melt will affect downstream water availability.
Sutapa Bhattacharjee
Sutapa Bhattacharjee is a research associate working at the University of Sheffield. She is particularly focussing to understand the nature of extreme meteorological events across the Andes through climate modelling, as a part of WP2.
In DaR, Sutapa will provide past and future climate model output to better understand the processes behind snowfall in the Andes. This data will also be used as input data for the glacier modelling in WP3.