Kilian Hermes
- Email: eekfh@leeds.ac.uk
- Thesis title: Dust storms in the Sahara and Sahel: From Nowcasting to Climate
- Supervisors: Prof John Marsham, Dr Massimo Bollasina (University of Edinburgh), Dr Franco Marenco (The Cyprus Institute), Dr Melissa Brooks (Met Office), TT-Prof Martina Klose (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology)
Profile
I’m a third-year PhD student at the Institute for Climate and Atmospheric Science in the Institute for Climate and Atmospheric Science.
My research is focused on mineral dust, an essential component of Earth’s climate system. With my current PhD project I look into short range forecasts of dust storms, so called nowcasts, for which numeric models often show very low skill. I generate a novel nowcast for dust storms, based on satellite observations and deep learning methods. This nowcast allows deterministic and probabilistic short-term predictions of storms that are often missed by currently operational weather prediction models, and can help to fill key gaps in our understanding of dust emissions and the Earth’s dust cycle.
I am further involved in the WISER-EWSA project, which aims to transform access to early weather warning systems for urban communities in South Africa, Zambia, Mozambique and other countries across Southern Africa. We successfully deployed an adapted version of my nowcast for predicting convective cells over southern Africa during the project testbed.
I am part of the SENSE CDT - Centre for satellite data in environmental science, funded by NERC and the UK space agency.
Research interests
- Extreme weather
- Machine learning, unsupervised
- Satellite remote sensing
- Mineral dust
- Nowcasting
- African Meteorology
Qualifications
- MSc Meteorology, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany
- BSc Meteorology, Leipzig University, Germany
Research groups and institutes
- Institute for Climate and Atmospheric Science
- Atmospheric and Cloud Dynamics