Perhaps the most important course I took while an undergraduate student at UMIST was called Human Uses of Energy. It was given by Professor Mike Rusbridge and I remember vividly how he presented empirical facts about the state of global energy use and provided estimates in BTUs of the potential for harnassing energy from different natural and man-made sources. When it came to deciding what to do for my PhD, alternative energy and, in particular, fusion won out over my second choice – atmospheric physics. Atmospheric physics fascinated me as for the first time in my life, I started to understand why it rains, why it snows and how thunder strikes. It was all thanks to a single lecture course on atmospheric physics at given by “the thunderbird” Dr Clive Saunders – who used to fly airplanes full of instrumentation directly at and through thunderstorms! After 6 years dedicated to teaching and science communication, I returned to research in 2003 when I had the opportunity to work in the field of atmospheric physics in Greece. I worked on holistic models of street level flows and urban heat islands for the ATREUS project in the Laboratory of Heat Transfer and Electrical Engineering at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. I learned a great deal from Professor Nikolaos Moussiopoulos and from Dr Ioannis Douros and their knowledge helped whet my appetite for this fascinating and important field of research. I am currently collaborating with Dr Stelios Kazadzis in the Atmospheric Physics & Chemistry Group of the Institute for Environmental Research and Sustainable Development at the National Observatory of Athens, to develop neural networks that can exploit the global coverage provided by Satellites like MODIS to interpolate aerosol micro-physical properties between AERONET ground stations.
Peer-Reviewed Articles:
- Kalognomou EA, Moussiopolous N, Taylor M (2004) Chapter 2: Review of relevant studies and projects. In: N. Moussiopoulos et al (2004) Street Emission Ceiling Phase I Final Report. European Topic Centre on Air & Climate Change (ETC/ACC) Technical Paper 2003/11, EU Technical Reports, August 2004. [post-print] [Full Report]
Conference Talks:
- Taylor M (2003) A Holistic Approach to Turbulence Modelling, presented to the EU consortium on atmospheric modelling, ATREUS Workshop, Meteorological Institute, Hamburg, Germany [PPT Talk]
