Alex Bradley

Alex Bradley

Mathematician turned climate scientist at the British Antarctic Survey and University of Cambridge. Keen software developer and open code advocate. Usually found on a bicycle.

Research

I apply numerical, statistical, and analytic methods to help answer questions relating to the cryosphere. I use models, from simple schematic models to large general circulation models, to address questions relating to the changes we observe and to simulate those that may occur in the future. I am also interested in the public policy implications associated with a changing cryosphere.

Ice Shelf Processes: Melting and Calving

Ice shelves play an integral role in modulating sea level rise by buttressing the adjoining grounded ice. Ice shelves lose mass predominantly via calving and melting, which have typically been assumed to be largely independent of one another. However, calving affects ice shelf cavities, with the potential to change melt rates and changes in melt rates change ice shelf properties, with the potential to alter calving and crevassing processes. I am trying to understand how calving and melting interact, and what are the implications of these for ice dynamics?

More broadly, ice shelf collapse is an example of a (possibly) low likelihood, high impact event; understanding such events allows us to constrain high end ice loss under future warming scenarios.

Publications

Sea Level Rise

The Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets represent the biggest uncertainties in future sea level rise projections. By studing the behaviour of these ice sheets on both small and large scales, we can improve future predictions of ice sheet mass loss.

From small scales…

In climate models, many processes are parametrized for computation tractability. In ice sheet models in particular, these are often related to melting, both at the grounding line and on the ice shelf itself. I use reduced complexity models, asymptotic methods, and ocean models to try to constrain these processes.

Publications

…to large scales

Bayesian calibration methods can be used to refine predictions of future Antarctic ice sheet loss. Currently, I am applying such methods to help to quantify the impact of the El-Niño Southern Oscillation on the past and future rate of ice loss from West Antarctica.

Publications

Cryosphere Attribution

Attribution science seeks to describe, quantitatively, the effect of climate change on weather events. Given the long timescales involved, ice sheet evolution can also be considered a “weather event”. However, despite its ubiquity in images of climate change, there has been no formal attribution of changes to the Antarctic or Greenland ice sheets to climate change.

Publications

Droplet Dynamics

My PhD was concerned with bendotaxis, an elastocapillary droplet transport mechanism that is both passive (i.e. requires no external energy input) and, surprisingly, moves droplets in the same direction regardless of whether they wet the channel or not.

This work was undertaken under the fantastic supervision of Prof. Dominic Vella and Prof. Ian Hewitt.

Publications

Press