Dr Andrew Tait
Chief Scientist - Climate, Atmosphere and Hazards
Andrew is Chief Scientist - Climate, Atmosphere and Hazards. His research areas of interest are climate change impacts and implications, adaptation to climate change, spatial modelling of climate, and sector and business applications of climate data. Andrew is a lead author of the Australasia chapter of the IPCC Fifth Assessment WGII Report, a member of the WMO Commission for Climatology (CCl) executive, co-chair of the WMO Focus Area on 'Climate Services for Societal Benefits', and the chair of the Pacific Islands Climate Services Panel. He was seconded to MPI in 2017 to contribute to the Primary Sector Science Roadmap and seconded to DOC from 2017-2019 to interact with researchers, managers, operations staff and the policy team to improve the understanding and use of climate data and information throughout the Department.
Dr Emily Lane
Principal Scientist - Natural Hazards and Hydrodynamics
Dr Emily Lane is a hydrodynamic scientist with a specific focus on natural hazards. She is actively researching tsunami, storm surge and flooding inundation. She is interested in tsunamis caused by mechanisms other than earthquakes such as submarine landslides and volcanos. She is currently leading a Marsden project to better understand volcanic tsunamis by studying their mechanisms physically and numerically. She is also leading Mā te haumaru ō te wai - an Endeavour programme focussed on understanding Aotearoa's flood inundation hazard and risk at a national level and using this to improve our resilience to flooding. She has been involved in a probabilistic hazard assessment of the submarine-landslide-generated tsunamis in Cook Strait Canyon. She is a member of the Tsunami Expert Panel who provide expert advice to Civil Defence during tsunami alerts. Her background is applied mathematics and she has a PhD in applied mathematics with a geoscience minor from the University of Arizona. She has been working at NIWA since 2006.
