Met Office Academic Partnership expands with new joint roles
The four joint Leeds-Met Office appointees will provide new leadership within the Schools of Earth and Environment (SEE), Geography and Mathematics.
Dr Steve Abel, Dr Tim Andrews, Dr Camilla Mathison, and Dr Lorenzo Tomassini will facilitate collaborations with the Met Office, delivering research, innovation and impact across climate science, impacts and mitigation, modelling, and machine-learning.
The new posts in the Schools of Geography and Mathematics mean that there is now active engagement in MOAP across the Schools of Earth and Environment, Mathematics, Geography, Chemistry, Computer Science, and the Business School.
Professor John Marsham, Met Office Joint Chair at Leeds, said:
“The climate crisis and the ongoing technological revolution of artificial intelligence and machine-learning means that there is growing urgency to not only deliver on core weather and climate science, but to work across disciplines to deliver solutions, and effectively use rapidly developing new technologies. MOAP has greatly benefited Leeds and the Met Office, and we expect opportunities from MOAP to continue to grow across campus.”
Meet the researchers
Dr Steven Abel
School of Earth and Environment
Dr Abel works extensively with field measurements and has played a lead role in national and international airborne experiments.
He uses observations to study physical processes in the atmosphere, with a focus on developing improved representations of aerosols, clouds and precipitation in weather forecast and climate models.
At the Met Office, he has recently moved to the Atmospheric Processes and Parametrizations team after managing the cloud and aerosol group within Observation-based Research for the last 6 years.
He will give an Institute for Climate and Atmospheric Science (ICAS) seminar on Wednesday 19th March.
Dr Tim Andrews
School of Earth and Environment
Dr Andrews works in the Climate Processes and Projections team in the Met Office Hadley Centre.
His expertise includes Earth’s heat uptake, forcing and climate feedback processes across timescales, with a focus on bridging regional and global scales.
He has recently developed theories on the relationship between observed patterns of tropical Pacific warming and cloud feedback.
Dr Andrews said: “As the climate continues to rapidly change, there is an urgent need to provide more precise predictions of why and by how much the climate will change in the future.
“Addressing such a challenging question requires bringing together world-leading expertise in weather and climate science.
“I am therefore delighted to take on this MOAP position to deepen collaborations between the Met Office and Leeds on the physics of climate change and to pursue pioneering questions in climate science together.”
Read his paper ‘On the Effect of Historical SST Patterns on Radiative Feedback.’
Dr Camilla Mathison
Dr Mathison leads the mitigation science team in climate science, contributing to research and developing tools to enable the rapid interpretation of new mitigation scenarios and their impacts.
The team works with the UK government to understand how we can avoid the most dangerous impacts of climate change, informing it of the impacts and opportunities of reducing emissions and limiting warming.
Camilla leads the team developing PRIME, an Earth system emulator framework, which includes the FaIR simple climate model and allows regional impacts to be calculated from global emissions scenarios.
She will continue to develop the FaIR model to include more Earth system processes and to broaden the applications and impacts that PRIME could be used for.
Dr Mathison said: “We are entering into a crucial decade for climate mitigation where we need to see progress in reducing our emissions. Tools like PRIME, that are useful for understanding the regional impact of global climate scenarios will be increasingly important for designing climate policy. I am excited to be returning to Leeds and I am looking forward to working in the Geography department to develop these aspects of climate science.”
Dr Lorenzo Tomassini
After a degree in Mathematics and a PhD in Mathematical Physics at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), Dr Tomassini moved into environmental sciences, initially working on uncertainty quantification in climate modelling.
He joined the Global Atmospheric Model Development group of the Met Office in 2015.
The group develops the global atmospheric model that the Met Office uses across a wide range of time and spatial scales. Dr Tomassini is particularly engaged in developing a km-scale-resolution, convection-permitting configuration of that global model, but is also interested in linking with data scientists at Leeds and using machine learning techniques to solve problems in atmospheric and climate science.
Dr Tomassini said: “Steep advances in computational capabilities and data science are revolutionising weather and climate science.
“Together with Met Office and University of Leeds scientists we aim at combining ultra-high resolution numerical modelling and data science techniques at the forefront of this revolution, engaging with international initiatives such as the World Climate Research Programme Lighthouse Activity on Digital Earths.”
Met Office Academic Partnership
The University of Leeds is a founding member of the Met Office Academic Partnership.
The roles are funded by the University of Leeds as part of its strategic investment in MOAP.
There are growing opportunities from MOAP across disciplines, and a fifth post for the School of Computer Science is in development.
