Katherine Vest

PhD: Understanding the indirect climate impacts of halogens in the troposphere

Location: Lancaster University

Email: k.vest@lancaster.ac.uk

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kathryn-vest-14204a230/

X: @Kathrynvxx

I graduated from Lancaster University in 2023 with a BSc in Environmental Science. My main interests during my undergraduate degree included atmospheric science, climate change and I enjoyed pursuing research projects including a microclimate study on a glacier in Switzerland and my dissertation. My dissertation project ‘Global Stilling: Is wind power running out?’ used Matlab to carry out time series analysis to investigate the trends in high resolution wind speed data for Lancaster.

My PhD project is titled ‘Understanding the indirect climate impacts of halogens in the troposphere’. There is great understanding of halogens in the stratosphere however, the role of halogens in the troposphere has been largely overlooked. Importantly, halogens alter the troposphere’s oxidising power and may have climate implications, for example altering the lifetime of important greenhouse gases such as methane. The project involves developing and applying a state-of-the-art atmospheric model to investigate the tropospheric abundance and distribution of reactive halogens and considering how this has changed as a result of anthropogenic activities. The main focus is on how reactive chlorine species affect the lifetime and abundance of methane and its various isotopes.