Robin Hogan
Professor of Atmospheric Physics
Head of Department for Research

Latest news

• March 2013: I've posted some materials for primary school visits about weather forecasting and thunderstorms, including how to make a thunderstorm out of cream.
• February 2013: My paper with Jon Shonk has appeared in Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences, demonstrating a new way to represent the effects of 3D radiative transfer in a radiation scheme suitable for weather and climate models.
• January 2013: My second daughter Juliette was born on 21st Jan!
• May 2012: A new method to perform reverse-mode automatic differentiation has been developed using the expression template programming technique and is found to be 5-9 times faster than the current leading tools providing the same functionality: Learn more...
• January 2012: We're moving into the busiest phase of my "DYMECS" project to evaluate the evolution of thunderstorms in the Met Office forecast model using radar: Kirsty Hanley has recently started on the modelling side, Thorwald Stein has started a DYMECS website to describe the cases so far, and I appeared on a NERC podcast to outline the project.
• January 2012: The second edition of Forecast Verification has been published, including a chapter by Robin Hogan and Ian Mason on verifying forecasts of binary events. This includes an exhaustive evaluation of different binary performance measures and a general method to calculate the error on performance measures.
• November 2011: My paper has been accepted showing that ice particles should be treated as smarties not gobstoppers when it comes to calculating their radar scattering properties.
• October 2011: New version of radar and lidar multiple scattering code released. New features include full Fortran 90 interface, full adjoint code for retrieval algorithms using quasi-Newton minimization and efficient modelling of multiple field-of-view and HSRL lidars.
• December 2010: Our ice cloud products derived from combining the CloudSat radar and Calipso lidar have been released. The method is described in the 2010 paper by Julien Delanoe and myself

Research

My research concerns clouds, radiative transfer and remote sensing with radar and lidar. I lead the Clouds Group, although we overlap heavily with the Radar Group and many of us participate in Radiation Group meetings. At Reading I collaborate with a number of other members of academic staff, and I am currently involved in funded projects with Christine Chiu, Helen Dacre, Anthony Illingworth and Bob Plant. I am also an NCEO PI. Please note that I am not an expert on weather modification and so will be unable to answer any queries on this topic.

• The Clouds Group
• Publications
• Presentations
• Curriculum Vitae (PDF)
• Overview of research interests

Some freely available research codes I have written:

• Adept automatic differentiation library
• 3D fractal cirrus model
• Radar and lidar multiple scattering model
• Variational polarimetric retrieval of rain and hail

Teaching resources

• Material for school visits: weather forecasting and thunderstorms
• Resources for Weather and Climate Discussion
• Animations demonstrating radar and radiative transfer phenomena using a 2D Maxwell solver
• How to combine errors (PDF)

Contact details

• Address Room 503, Philip Lyle Building, Department of Meteorology, Earley Gate, Reading RG6 6BX, UK.
  
• Tel +44 (0)118 3786416
  
• Fax +44 (0)118 3788905
  
• Email r.j.hogan@reading.ac.uk

Not work

A desktop ammusement I wrote for Unix/Linux, now included in several Linux distributions.	A review of Reading Curry Houses in the style of an enduring sci-fi series.	Assorted holiday snaps.