Sarah Gallagher is a meteorologist in the Research, Environment and Applications Division at Met Éireann, the Irish Meteorological Service. In her current role she has responsibility for the Marine Unit, which manages the gathering and dissemination of Irish marine observational data, carries out ocean-wave-atmosphere modelling research and provides support for Met Éireann’s operational sea area weather forecasting activities.

Sarah graduated with a B.A., B.A.I. in Engineering from Trinity College Dublin in 2003. After working in the Instruments Unit of Met Éireann, installing and servicing automatic weather stations around Ireland, she completed a M.Sc. in Meteorology at the UCD School of Mathematics and Statistics in 2011. In 2014, she finished her Ph.D. in Applied and Computational Mathematics at UCD, under the supervision of Professor Frédéric Dias. The title of her thesis was “The nearshore wave climate of Ireland: past, present and future”, which involved the high-resolution simulation, assessment and quantification of the wind and wave climate of Ireland and the Northeast Atlantic. Her research also included running wave climate projection ensembles for the end of the 21st century.

More recently, her research has focused on extremes and climate change, examining the link between extremes and low-frequency modes of atmospheric variability such as the North Atlantic Oscillation.