The Met Department Research Away-Day makes a return!

By: Dr. Patrick C. McGuire 

After a hiatus of 10 years, the Met Department has held a Research Away-Day once again. Over 150 Away-Day participants sauntered all the way to the Palmer Building. The Palmer Building is still on the University of Reading Whiteknights campus, but critically *away* from the Brian Hoskins and Harry Pitt buildings, where we might have otherwise been distracted by our normal working-day activities. 

The reincarnation of the Met Dept. Research Away-Day was the led by the now-outgoing Head of Department, Prof. Joy Singarayer. Following consultations that she held with department staff and students, it was clear that there was an enthusiasm to bring back the in-person vibe to the Met Dept. after it partially disappeared during the COVID pandemic.  

The in-person vibe had been partially lost to hybrid or completely-online Teams and Zoom meetings and to many of us working from home (WFH) for multiple days per week. Yes, the hybrid option (or recording option) in the meetings is so nice sometimes, when we need to take care of family members, when we are off at a conference, or when we really need to focus for a deadline, but the in-person vibe of the Met Dept had not really made its full return until we all met for the extended day-long Research Away-Day over in the Palmer Building last Thursday. 

Photo 2: Dhirendra Kumar giving a 4-minute short talk about a Simple loss model for European windstorms (Photo credit: Ankit Bhandekar)

We had 30 short 4-minute talks and two 12-minute keynote talks during the main sessions in a fit-for-purpose 150-seat auditorium. Dr. Andrea Dittus and Dr. James O’Donoghue were the keynote speakers. Andrea regaled us with her insights into What happens to the climate during stabilisation scenarios. James went on to amaze us with his stories about the Aurorae of Jupiter and their relation to heat flow. The 30 other speakers had a ‘long’ 4 minutes to wow the audience with their research vignettes on topics ranging from Urban-scale modelling, to Melt-ponds on sea ice, and further to Mineral dust in the atmosphere. 

 We also had morning and afternoon breakout sessions, with a total of 7 different topics. Participants stated their preferences for the breakout topics during registration. I helped to organize two of the breakout sessions: New software tools in climate and weather; and Statistics of climate risk, finance, & insurance. And I helped to facilitate the discussion in one of the breakout groups of the session on New software tools in climate and weather. In that discussion, we did spend almost 40% of the time talking about using large language models such as ChatGPT to serve as programming assistants. 

Photo 3: At the end of the afternoon main session in the lecture room (Photo credit: David Brayshaw)

I also was able to attend a different breakout session, about Using AI to help your research, led by Prof. Singarayer and Dr. Mark Muetzelfeldt. They did a superb job leading that session, and they gave us a group project to do at the end of the session, wherein we asked ChatGPT to produce Python code to do a first-pass trend analysis and visualization of the temperature and precipitation records from over 200 years of data from the Oxford weather stations. It was rather amazing to find out what improvements to ChatGPT have been made since it first came out over a year and a half ago. 

Photo 4: Research strategy & culture session, led by 3 Research Division Leads (Profs. Emily Black, Paul Williams, & Danny Feltham). (Photo credit: Joy Singarayer)

We did have a very-interesting, dedicated session where the 3 Research Division Leads (Profs. Emily Black, Paul Williams, & Danny Feltham) discussed Research strategy & culture. The audience opinions on how well the department is doing in providing excellent and inclusive research environments were all recorded and tabulated by the Mentimeter website. 

The poster session and scientific socializing were also both top notch. I was able to present my poster on Growing virtual crops in Peru during climate change, and I had several interested customers, including Dr. Martin Airey and Dr. Robin Hogan. I think the catering by Venue Reading was superb, and the food and drink were part of the reason the in-person vibe and the scientific socializing were able to return to our department to such a degree after the COVID & WFH hiatus. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen so many different groups of people in our department happily chatting away. It’s too bad that we don’t have a few photos of the poster hall.  

Photo 5: Water@Reading meetup (Harshita Gupta, Dr. Helen Hooker, David Richardson, Prof. Hannah Cloke, & Prof. Liz Stephens) at the Met Dept. Research Away-Day (Photo Credit: Hannah Cloke’s camera)

I found out about the return of the Research Away-Day from Prof. Singarayer when it was in its infancy, when she mentioned it while giving her perspective as Head of Department at one of our meetings of the Senior Researcher Forum. I raised my hand and said that I wanted to help organize the Research Away-Day because I had organized a similar event for the Geosciences Dept. when I was working at the Free University of Berlin, called the Internal GeoSymposium. I had also previously attended events of a similar nature at the University of Chicago’s Geophysical Sciences Dept. (the Noon Balloons), in the University of Arizona’s Astronomy Dept. (internal symposia), and in Bielefeld University’s Computer Science Dept. (an overnight retreat to a meeting place in a small village).  

Some of you have probably attended either our department’s Research Away-Days over 10 years ago or other universities’ departments’ Research Away-Days of some sort. These Research Away-Days have a long tradition, apparently. I would speculate that Research Away-Days go back many centuries, maybe even to the time of the ancient Greeks. 

 The other co-organizers (Dr. Ambrogio Volonté, Dr. Daniel Shipley, Dr. Thomas Wilder, and Dr. Holly Ayres) of the University of Reading Met Dept. Research Away-Day also found out about the initiative from Joy while attending either the Senior Researcher Forum or the Post-doctoral Forum. Together with Joy, we started having organizational meetings for the Research Away-Day in November 2023, meeting every few weeks, with an increasing cadence of weekly meetings starting in early May 2024. 

Figure 1: Preliminary, incomplete polling results from Research Away-Day participants about how often the future Away-Day conferences should be. The single participant who selected Other suggested a 3-year cadence.

I’m personally hoping that we can have another Met Dept. Research Away-Day in one year, but I have heard some people suggest that every second year would be better. Alas, I have also heard an enthusiastic endorsement of holding another Research Away-Day in 6 months’ time. Results from a more-complete, yet-ongoing survey are shown in Fig.1, above. Twenty-three (23) participants suggested every year; sixteen (16) participants suggested every two years; 1 participant suggested every three years; 1 participant suggested every 6 months; and nobody has suggested never having it again. In the comments section, some people have suggested having a two-day Away-Day, and some people have suggested having the weekly Lunchtime Seminars sometimes feature multiple short talks. Regardless, let’s keep this in-person vibe going!