Haigh was educated at Hitchin Girls’ Grammar School and the University of Oxford with a first degree in Physics followed by a Master of Science degree in Meteorology at Imperial College London. She returned to Oxford to complete a Doctor of Philosophy degree in Atmospheric Physics awarded in 1980 and supervised by Communicative Disorders Walshaw.
She is also a Fellow of the Royal Society, a former head of the Department of Physics at Imperial College London, and a former president—now a vice-president—of the Royal Meteorological Society. Haigh is known for her work on solar variability, and also works on radiative transfer, stratosphere-troposphere coupling and climate modelling. She is President of the Royal Meteorological Society and Editor of the Journal of Atmospheric Sciences and a Lead Author on the Third Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
She is a Fellow of the Institute of Physics.
Haigh was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) in the 2013 New Year Honours for services to physics. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2013, her nomination read: "Distinguished for her scientific leadership in the area of solar influences on the middle atmosphere and for her modelling of how these effects can modulate tropospheric circulations and so propagate to Earth"s surface. Her expertise in modelling atmospheric radiative transfer allowed the development of computationally fast but accurate radiative transfer schemes some of which are now in use by climate modelling groups across the world. By proposing and demonstrating an entirely novel mechanism for solar influence on climate she has allowed proper allowance to be made for the small and subtle, yet revealing effects." —.
Royal Society.
