Profile

Having enjoyed my summer as a STOR-I intern in 2018, I joined the programme in 2019 after graduating from Lancaster University with a BSc Hons in Mathematics and Statistics. I started my PhD in September 2020, following completion of my MRes in Statistics and Operational Research. My PhD investigates ‘spatial pooling for extreme value inference.’ This is supervised by Prof. Jon Tawn and is in collaboration with the natural hazards R&D team at EDF Energy, where I am supervised by Dr Dafni Sifnioti and Dr Amelie Joly Laugel.

Currently, I am focusing on extreme sea level estimation along the UK coastline. Rises in mean sea level coupled with changes in storm behaviour due to climate change have increased the risk of coastal flooding. Therefore it is increasingly important to accurately estimate extreme sea levels for coastal flood risk management. Extreme sea level estimation requires statistical analysis based on extreme value theory to extrapolate to unobserved levels of the data. By filtering out waves and removing the mean sea level trend, we consider peak tide and skew surge as the only components of sea levels. Peak tides are predictable; we account for their within and interannual variations. Skew surges are driven meteorologically and hence stochastic. These define the difference between peak tide and the maximum observed sea level within a tidal cycle. We model extreme skew surges using a generalised Pareto distribution. We capture seasonality, longer-term trends and the dependence between skew surge and peak tide through daily, yearly and tidal covariates in the scale and rate parameters.