Tommy Lees

Tommy Lees

PhD Student at the University of Oxford | droughts, satellites, machine learning, East Africa | former GB Modern Pentathlete | Crystal Palace Football Club

Research

Science is the vehicle for the proliferation of opportunity and the betterment of the human condition.

My research is motivated by this belief in the need to research questions that improve people’s lives. I aim to combine data from Earth Observation missions (mainly satellites) and computational models (such as those used to better understand climate change).

My research is motivated by my interest in using Earth Observation data to better understand, monitor and ultimately predict droughts in East Africa. More generally, I am interested in combining modelling approaches (climate and land-surface models) with Earth Observation to get the best insights from pre-existing datasets.

Supervision

I am supervised by Professor Simon Dadson and Dr Steven Reece.

  • Prof. Simon Dadson’s experience spans hydrology, climate change impacts and adpatations, African climate and weather, and land surface modelling. He is currently leading a project, HydroJULES to improve the hydrological component of the Met Office Land Surface Model - JULES.
  • Dr. Steven Reece works with the Machine Learning and Pattern Recognition Group and has an interest in applying machine learning to improve disaster response. He has worked on a variety of other projects applying bayesian approaches to reasoning with uncertainty.

I aim to combine their interests to develop novel approaches to improve drought monitoring and to better utilise all data sources available to climate scientists.

### My Interests

  • I want to contribute to open-source science and aim to make my results open access and reproducible.
  • I love coding and would very much like to develop tools for other scientists to use.
  • Working with a group of like-minded and driven scientists in short sprints to develop minimum viable products as first-pass solutions to research questions.

Current Projects

I am currently working on four projects, all of which are focused on East African Drought and the variables that feed into drought.

#### 1. Producing a High-resolution Evapotranspiration Data Product over Africa. #### 2. Developing a Framework for Context-Specific Drought Monitoring. #### 3. Combining the JULES Land Surface Model With Earth Observation data for Soil Moisture Estimation. #### 4. Quantifying the impact of Drought on Crop Yields in East Africa.

More information to follow!

See CV page for a list of presentations and their PDF files.