Reading Exchange Students’ Capstone Presented Around the World

Reading Exchange Students’ Capstone Presented Around the World

Over the years, the University of Reading, UK and the School of Meteorology (SoM) have shared a common goal; to educate the next generation of exceptional meteorologists. For almost 20 years the universities have participated in an exchange program, encouraging students to travel overseas and enrich their undergraduate studies.

Each spring a group of students from the SoM heads off to Reading for one semester, and each fall a group of University of Reading students joins us here in Oklahoma for a whole school year.

In the 2018-2019 school year, Reading students, Francesco Battaglioli, Hannah Croad, and Ryan Cumming joined the SoM undergrads and enrolled in the year-long undergraduate research course, capstone.

In their research titled, “A Climatology of High Shear Low CAPE (HSLC) Environments Across the Contiguous United States and Europe using Reanalysis Data” these students analyzed over 12 million data points to gain an understanding of how wind profiles and potential energy impact severe weather environments. They set out to improve the understanding of how often, where, and the annual and diurnal (daily) cycles of HSLC environments as well as draw similarities between HSLC environments in the southeast U.S. and portions of Europe.


As part of their coursework, the Associate Director of Undergraduate Studies for the SoM, Dr. Elinor Martin and Dr. Harold Brooks, a member of the National Severe Storms Lab and SoM Adjunct faculty, acted as co-mentors on this project. After completing the research in May, one of the students, Francesco Battaglioli, first presented the findings at the Italian Meteorological Congress this past September.Impressed with their research results, Dr.Harold Brooks then presented their findings at the European Severe Storms Conference in Krakow, Poland in November. The SoM and the University of Reading worked together to fund all three students to ensure their attendance at the conference to see their work presentation.More recently, Dr. Martin presented the same research at the American Meteorological Society conference in Boston last week.

Dr. Martin tells us, “It is a big honor to present undergraduate research at such big conferences!”

Congratulations to these students on their outstanding work as undergraduate researchers!

Over 50 OU students and more than 100 Reading students have participated in the exchange since the program started. The SoM currently has six students from Reading and the nine OU students that traveled to Reading this semester are part of the largest exchange group we have ever had.

These students were also featured by the University of Reading. You can read more here!