PhD candidate recipient of award for ground breaking paper
Lettie Roach, from Victoria University of Wellington, was yesterday announced as the joint recipient of the Hatherton Award of the Royal Society of New Zealand for her contribution to a paper on a new generation of sea ice models.
The paper–An Emergent Sea Ice Floe Size Distribution in a Global Coupled Ocean-Sea Ice Model–was published by the Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans in June this year.
Lettie is a PhD candidate in the School of Geography, Environment and Earth Sciences, and mostly based at NIWA. Her research looks at how ice floes, the building blocks of sea ice, can be incorporated into climate models.
“Sea ice plays an important role in the global climate system, but traditional climate models have struggled to correctly simulate observed trends in sea ice extent.” Lettie says, “By incorporating ice floe size into the model, we’ve allowed for a better representation of thermodynamic processes, as well as the inclusion of new physical processes that could not previously be represented.”
Professor James Renwick, one of Lettie’s supervisors, described Lettie as “an amazing young scientist” and strongly emphasised the high level of contribution she made to this ground breaking research and subsequent paper.
“The work described in the paper is at the leading edge of research internationally and has the potential to make significant improvements to the simulation of the polar regions in global climate models,” says Professor Renwick.
Lettie is mostly supervised by Dr Sam Dean from NIWA and collaborates with Dr Christopher Horvat, from the Institute of Brown for Environment and Society at Brown University, USA and Dr Cecilia Bitz, from Atmospheric Sciences, University of Washington, all of whom were co-authors.
The Hatherton Award of the Royal Society of New Zealand is, each year, granted for the best paper in physical sciences, earth sciences, or mathematics and information sciences by a New Zealand University PhD student.
Lettie says, “I am delighted to be one of the recipients of the Hatherton Award this year. It is very rewarding to have my work recognised in this way, and to have received support from the international sea ice community during the nomination process.
“It is certainly a confidence boost that will help spur me on through these last few months of the PhD.”