MrOliver Driver

Oliver is a cirrus cloud physicist interested in the obstacles to our understanding of cirrus cloud thinning and contrail mitigation.

He is based in the Cloud Physics Group of the Space, Plasma and Climate community in the Department of Physics at Imperial College London. He works with Dr. Edward Gryspeerdt on the NERC ECLIPSE project, part of the broader programme to for modelling environmental responses to solar radiation management.

During his PhD, his research studied the liming factors for the validation of contrail models.

Contrails are the clouds that form in lines behind planes. These human-caused clouds have a impact on the climate—they likely cause the biggest part of the climate warming from aviation. Satellites are an important tool to be able to understand contrails better and monitor any action taken to mitigate them. Oliver's research focuses on relating the observations of contrails to their properties, and the uncertainty in the inputs to contrail models.

His PhD was also at Imperial, working with Prof. Marc Stettler and Dr. Edward Gryspeerdt.

Previously, Oliver has worked on simulating instruments used for imaging ice crystals in clouds at the University of Manchester as part of his PhD. For his MPhys project at the University of Oxford, he examined the fractal dimension of clouds in global convection permitting models compared to clouds in satellite observations.