News archive

2018

• August 2018: My paper on the new ECMWF radiation scheme, ecRad has appeared in JAMES. Version 1.1.0 of ecRad has also been released.
• February 2018: Our paper has appeared in GMD describing how the SPARTACUS approach can be used to compute the 3D interaction of solar radiation with vegetation canopies, including a demonstration implementation in Matlab.

2017

• October 2017: Adept version 2.0 has been released: this C++ library combines array and automatic differentiation capabilities.
• July 2017: ECMWF model cycle 43R3 became operational: this cycle includes my new radiation scheme ecRad.
• February 2017: ecRad, the offline version of the new ECMWF radiation scheme is now available under the OpenIFS license.

2016

• December 2016: I have extended the Self Similar Rayleigh Gans Approximation (SSRGA) to compute the full scattering phase function of snow aggregates observed in the microwave (Hogan et al., QJ). C and Matlab implementations of the algorithm are available on the SSRGA page.
• August 2016: EOS have highlighted our work on how to represent 3D radiative effects into weather and climate models, just published in JGR: Part 1 (lead author Sophia Schaefer) and Part 2.
• March 2016: ECMWF model cycle 41R2 became operational: this cycle includes my changes that have improved temperatures at coastlines and improved stratospheric climate.

2015

• June 2015: Version 1.1 of the Adept automatic differentiation software library has been released. Changes since version 1.0 include OpenMP parallelization of Jacobian calculations and use of the more permissive Apache 2.0 license, allowing it to be used in proprietary software.
• February 2015: Have a look at these three papers in Early View in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society: Stein et al. summarises our thunderstorm work in the DYMECS project, Illingworth et al. describes the forthcoming EarthCARE satellite with an example from my synergy algorithm, and Wood et al. describes the 2009-2010 ARM deployment in the Azores.
• January 2015: The software license of my radar and lidar multiple scattering model has been changed to Apache 2.0, which places fewer restrictions on the user.
• January 2015: Very well done also to another of my PhD students, Mark Fielding, who successfully defended his thesis on 13 January and has already published two papers.

2014

• November 2014: Very well done to my PhD student Julian Mann, who successfully defended his thesis on 27 November. His first paper was published earlier this year.
• July 2014: There was a good Reading showing at the AMS Conference on Atmospheric Radiation and Cloud Physics. I gave talks on microwave scattering by snowflakes and liquid cloud properties from Calipso, and a poster on mixing in convective storms. I was involved in work presented by Christine Chiu on aerosol affects on drizzle and liquid cloud properties from lidar, by Mark Fielding on 3D cloud retrievals, by Sophia Schaefer on longwave 3D radiative effects and by Thorwald Stein on clouds in the West African monsoon and the 3D structure of convective storms.
• July 2014: My paper on the Adept C++ library for fast automatic differentiation has finally been published.
• July 2014: I've posted some Matlab test code to demonstrate the Self-Similar Rayleigh-Gans Approximation, a fast method to compute high frequency radar backscatter from aggregated ice particles and snowflakes.
• January 2014: I've accepted a position at ECMWF working on atmospheric radiation to start 1 April 2014, retaining a small fraction of my time at the University of Reading. I am therefore no longer taking on new students and postdocs. The PhD project I had proposed, "What controls the structure of UK thunderstorms?" will now be led by Chris Westbrook.

2013

• October 2013: I've been awarded the 2014 Henry G. Houghton Award by the American Meteorological Society.
• June 2013: Natalie Harvey, who recently finished her PhD with Helen Dacre and myself, has released her code for objectively diagnosing boundary layer type from Doppler lidar. See also her paper describing the method.
• June 2013: I've posted some animations of thunderstorms simulated by the Met Office model at resolutions of both 1.5 km and 200 m. These are from the DYMECS project; see also my talk at the March RMetS meeting about our achievements in this project.
• 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!

2012

• 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.

Older news

• 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
• July 2010: Ever heard of the Equitable Threat Score, probably the most widely used verification measure in meteorology? It turns out it's not equitable: read paper
• June 2010: Atmospheric radiation schemes treat the spectral variation of gaseous absorption by splitting the spectrum into a number of bands. This seems not to be necessary, opening the way for much faster codes: read paper
• April 2010: Chilbolton lidars capture the moment when volcanic ash "touched down" in southern England