Emily McCullough is a Lidar Support Scientist in Prof. James Drummond’s group at Dalhousie University. She is responsible for the CANDAC Rayleigh-Mie-Raman Lidar (CRL) at Eureka, Nunavut. Emily has a broad range of laboratory and field experience in optical remote sensing, calibration, and development of hardware and data processing procedures. She applies this to measurements of the high-resolution structure of Arctic tropospheric clouds, and the influence of this structure on local meteorology.
Emily completed her B.Sc. in Astrophysics (2007) at Saint Mary’s University (Halifax, NS) with a focus on experimental subatomic physics. Her M.Sc. (2009) and Ph.D. (2015) are in Astronomy with Specialization in Planetary Science at the University of Western Ontario (London, ON), with a focus on ground-based atmospheric lidar. She has also participated in operations of the mid-latitude Purple Crow Lidar, atmospheric image interpretation for NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory, low-level lidar processing improvements for the National Research Council’s airborne lidars, and scanning lidar projects for the Canadian Space Agency’s lunar analogue missions.
Emily has been doing Arctic atmospheric lidar research with CANDAC since 2007, including extensive field campaigns to the PEARL laboratories at Eureka. This began with gravity wave studies using the Stratospheric Ozone Differential Absorption Lidar (SOLID). Subsequently, she upgraded CRL to allow depolarization measurement capability to distinguish ice from water in tropospheric clouds. Since 2013, she has taken over the remaining operations and data processing for CRL. She is responsible for on-site instrument development/maintenance at Eureka. She carries out year-round measurements and interpretation remotely from St. John’s, Newfoundland, where she enjoys amateur astronomy, community gardening, and hiking.