My research work

I am employed by the Department of Meteorology at the University of Reading as a Senior Support Scientist.

One of my roles includes the provision of Level-2 data for the Department's Observatory webpages - see, for example these graphs.

Other activities include research and teaching (BSc and MSc) support work, and has included student project supervision.

I also created and maintain the Met-Jobs mailing list, which provides regular (free) mailings of job adverts in meteorology, oceanography and climatology (including vacancies in research, forecasting, technical support, and also course/study vacancies).

My previous roles included spells with the National Centre for Earth Observation (NCEO), and the Data Assimilation Research Centre (DARC) - working as a computational scientist in the fields of data assimilation and data analysis/visualisation. Prior to these I was employed by UGAMP - the UK Universities Global Atmospheric Modelling Programme.

During 2010-2012 I worked at the European Centre for Medium-range Weather Forecasts on their Reanalysis project. Reanalysis combines past meteorological observations into complete, comprehensive and coherent atmospheric datasets using an up-to-date version of a weather forecast model.

In recent years I have worked on a variety of projects, which have included:

  • The assimilation of ozone profiles from the EOS/MLS instrument into the ECMWF IFS weather forecast model, using 3D and 4Dvar techniques.
  • The insertion of observation processing code into the Met Office Unified Model to enable the assimilation of MIPAS ozone retrievals for research purposes.
  • The development of GDEVL, the Global Data Evaluation and Visualisation Laboratory. GDEVL is a hardware/software solution to the problem of analysing and visualising vast amounts of four-dimensional geophysical data, for example that which may be generated by high-resolution weather forecast models.
  • Globmodel - I was the webmaster for the project
  • Work led by colleagues at Noveltis (Toulouse) studying the impact of novel satellite observations (along-track winds and projected observations from DIMIWO) to assess their impact on numerical weather prediction.

In addition, to support the work of colleagues in High Resolution Atmospheric Assimilation Group I have been responsible for writing a variety of software packages to enable the analysis of atmospheric numerical model results and atmospheric observations.

American Meteorological Society presentations 2007

The following are copies of a presentation made at the 87th Annual Meeting of the American Meteorological Society, 16 January 2007, at San Antonio, Texas, titled Unusual European weather of 2006:

American Meteorological Society presentations 2008

The following are copies of a presentation made at the 88th Annual Meeting of the American Meteorological Society, 22 January 2008, at New Orleans, Louisiana, titled Tempest, fire and flood - European weather of 2007:

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See also

Royal Meteorological Society

Make your own weather observations? Then see the Climatological Observers Link

The Tornado and Storm Research Organisation

UK/Ireland synoptic station locations: