The European Commission has announced the funding of a new Innovative Training Network, led by Oxford University, which will train PhD students in Machine Learning Skills to address Climate Change.

iMIRACLI (innovative MachIne leaRning to constrain Aerosol-cloud CLimate Impacts) brings together leading climate and machine learning scientists across Europe with non-academic partners, such as Amazon and the MetOffice, to educate a new generation of climate data scientists.

The first results from the ExoMars mission supported by the UK Space Agency reveal the effects of a massive, global dust storm on the Red Planet.
British instruments reveal secrets of martian sky

Over the last year the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) spacecraft followed the onset of the storm and monitored how the increase in dust affected the water vapour in the atmosphere - important for understanding the history of water on Mars.

An international team of researchers from United Kingdom, Denmark, and Germany has found robust evidence for signatures of the 11-year sunspot cycle in the tropical Pacific. They analyzed historical time series of pressure, surface winds, and precipitation with specific focus on the Walker Circulation - a vast system of atmospheric flow in the tropical Pacific region that affects patterns of tropical rainfall. They have revealed that during periods of increased solar irradiance, the trade winds weaken and the Walker circulation shifts eastwards.

Sometimes satellites can provide an unexpected view of events. On the 18th December 2018 a huge meteor entered the Earth’s atmosphere over the northern Pacific Ocean, an event that – due to its isolated location – attracted very little attention at the time. American military satellites that look for bright flashes detected the meteor as it entered the Earth’s atmosphere and this enabled scientists at NASA to calculate its trajectory[1].

A new international study finds that the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation, a deep ocean process that plays a key role in regulating Earth’s climate, is primarily driven by cooling waters west of Europe. In a departure from the prevailing scientific view, the study shows that most of the overturning and variability is occurring not in the Labrador Sea off Canada, as past modelling studies have suggested, but in regions between Greenland and Scotland.

Due to a scarcity of data, most global estimates of ocean warming start only in the 1950s. However, a team of scientists at the University of Oxford has now succeeded in reconstructing ocean temperature change from 1871 to 2017.

The University of Oxford has marked the opening of the Beecroft Building, a new 8,950sqm building for experimental and theoretical physics.

World wide web pioneer Sir Tim Berners-Lee and donor Adrian Beecroft joined the Chancellor, Lord Patten of Barnes, and the Vice-Chancellor, Professor Louise Richardson, to officially open the new state-of-the-art facility located in Oxford University’s science area in Parks Road.