People - fcfa

Giresse Kuete Gouandjo

IMPALA

Role: Early Career Researcher

Giresse is a Ph.D. student at the University of Yaounde Cameroon. Understanding drivers of convection in Central Africa marks his current research activities. This research deals with better understanding of AEJ component dynamic, their links with regional mid-tropospheric circulation “highs, divergent centers” and diabatic heating.

Thierry Taguela

IMPALA

Role: Early Career Researcher

Thierry is a Ph.D. student at the Laboratory of Environmental Modelling and Atmospheric Physics (University of Yaounde). His work is on the assessment of precipitation bias in UM over Central Africa. The work focuses on an assessment of the contribution of both local and large-scale circulation on precipitation biases in UM. It has been established that large-scale circulation also contributes remotely to regional precipitation variability over the region.

Lorenzo Tomassini

IMPALA

Role: Researcher

Lorenzo works on the interaction between moist convection and the atmospheric circulation in the tropics. He is a member of the Global Model Evaluation and Development group at the UK Met Office. Prior to joining the Met Office he held a position as a scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, Germany. Lorenzo obtained his Ph.D. from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETHZ), Switzerland.

Cathryn Birch

IMPALA

Role: Researcher

Dr. Cathryn Birch is a tenure-tracked Academic Research Fellow at the University of Leeds. Her main expertise is in process study within dynamical meteorology using high-resolution weather and climate models. Recent work has focused on monsoons, tropical convection and land-surface interaction in West Africa, India and Southeast Asia. She works closely with the Met Office to diagnose the causes of biases in their suite of weather and climate models and to use them for the study of mesoscale processes within tropical environments

Richard Graham

IMPALA

Role: Project Manager

Richard leads the Monthly to Decadal Applications group, developing practical climate prediction products that can be readily used to inform planning and policy. This is done by distilling complex information from climate models and other sources into informative ‘user-friendly’ formats. Richard’s main research interest is working with Climate Centres in Africa to better understand and predict African rainy seasons and near-term (next 10 years) climate change, and working with the WMO to strengthen international collaboration in long-range forecasting. Richard has a Ph.D. in meteorology from Edinburgh University.

Catherine Senior

IMPALA

Role: Principal Investigator

Catherine leads a team of around 20 scientists, at the Met Office, working on understanding climate processes, feedbacks and uncertainty. Catherine joined the Met Office in 1986 after completing a degree in Mathematics at the University of Leeds. She has worked for her entire career on understanding climate processes and feedbacks, with a notable focus on cloud feedbacks and model development and evaluation. In 1997 she became the Manager of Climate sensitivity and then in 2003 the Head of Understanding Climate Change.

Christopher Taylor

AMMA 2050, IMPALA

Role: Principal Investigator

The principal lead of AMMA-2050, Chris is interested in how the properties of the land surface: soil moisture and vegetation cover, influence weather and climate. His work has been motivated by the need to understand the climate of semi-arid regions in West Africa. For IMPALA, Chris aims to deliver an Afro-centric development of aspects of the Met Office Unified Model and improve aspects of the land surface model JULES in its simulation of surface energy and water fluxes over typical African landscapes.

John Marsham

HyCRISTAL, IMPALA

Role: Principal Investigator

Dr. John Marsham is a Water@Leeds research fellow within NCAS-Weather. He leads a group studying atmospheric convection, tropical meteorology, and Saharan dust uplift. He focuses on taking process studies through to implications for and improvements in weather and climate models. In 2009 he was awarded the Royal Meteorological Society’s L F Richardson prize, in 2010 the European Meteorological Society’s Young Scientist Award for his “outstanding publications”. John holds an MSc. in Physics and a Ph.D. in Meteorology, University of Edinburgh.

Babatunde Abiodun

IMPALA

Role: Researcher

Babatunde is a lecturer at the University of Cape Town. His research interest is in development, evaluation, and application of dynamic atmospheric models focusing on a model that has capability for horizontal grid adaptation (called CAM-EULAG). He evaluates atmospheric models and uses them to study atmospheric systems that induce extreme events in Africa. He also applies these models for predicting seasonal climates, projecting future climates under different emission scenarios, and understanding potential impacts of land-cover changes on regional climates.

Matthew Collins

IMPALA

Role: Co-Principal Investigator

Matthew’s research interests lie within the areas of climate modelling, climate variability and change, quantifying uncertainty in climate projections, dynamics of the El Nino Southern Oscillation and the dynamics of the Indian monsoon as well as with the quantification of uncertainty in climate projections using ensembles of climate models. He led a group in the Met Office that produced ensembles and implemented an algorithm for producing probabilistic projections of climate change.

Piers Forster

IMPALA

Role: Climate Lead

Piers is the Professor of Physical Climate Change; Royal Society Wolfson Merit Award holder; Director of the Priestley International Centre for Climate. His research interests are in the fields of Climate change, Radiative forcing, climate modelling, climate change impact, climate change adaptation, aviation and climate. He holds a BSc in Physics from Imperial College London and a PhD in Meteorology from the University of Reading.

Matthew Hawcroft

IMPALA

Role: Researcher

Matthew is a Research Fellow within Exeter Climate Systems. His work for IMPALA involves evaluating large-scale controls on African climate with a specific focus on the global sources of regional bias in climate models, such as the global energy budget and regional/global SST biases. His Ph.D. focussed on the mid-latitude storm tracks and he continues to take an interest in this area. Prior to his PhD, he worked as a research assistant at the University of Oxford, researching climate change and food security in Africa.

James Haywood

IMPALA

Role: Project Lead

Jim has interests that include in-situ and remote sensing measurements of atmospheric aerosols and modelling their impacts upon weather, air-quality, visibility and climate. He has led many aircraft-based measurement campaigns investigating the impacts of Saharan dust over West Africa, biomass-burning smoke over West and South Africa, and volcanic aerosols from the Eyjafjallajokull eruption. Modelling work includes assessment of the climate impact of various different anthropogenic and natural aerosols, and the impacts of hypothetical schemes to counter global warming.

Linda Hirons

IMPALA

Role: Researcher

Linda is a Research Scientist in the National Centre for Atmospheric Science (NCAS)-Climate based in the Walker Institute within the Department of Meteorology. Linda’s research interests lie in the drivers of climate variability and change in Africa, the role of air-sea interactions in sub-seasonal climate variability, tropical convection systems, monsoon systems and climate services for Society. Linda holds a Masters degree in Mathematics from the University of East Anglia and a Ph.D. in Meteorology which focused on Tropical Dynamics from the University of Reading.

Richard Jones

FRACTAL, IMPALA

Role: Researcher

Richard is a Science Fellow at the Met Office and manages work on generating and applying regional climate information and modelling systems with a focus on international development. Richard has a Ph.D. in Mathematics in the analysis of numerical methods relevant to oil reservoir modelling. Prior to joining the Hadley Centre, he was a postdoctoral researcher in the Mathematics Department at Oxford University. He is a Visiting Professor in the School of Geography and Environment, University of Oxford, coordinating Met Office Academic Partnership activities and collaborative research.

Lawrence Jackson

IMPALA

Role: Researcher

Lawrence is a Research Fellow with the Leeds University’s School of Earth and Environment. Lawrence worked as an actuary in the life & pensions industry from 1987 to 2006. In 2006 he returned to university to study environmental science at the University of York before moving to the University of Leeds in 2007. Lawrence has a BSc. in Mathematics from the University of Southampton, an MSc. Environmental Science and Management from the University of York, and a Ph.D. in Understanding Diurnal Temperature Range Changes from the University of Leeds.

Rachel James

IMPALA, UMFULA

Role: Researcher

Rachel is a climate scientist, interested in change in African climate systems, and how climate science can provide more useful information for decision-makers. As part of IMPALA she is focusing on evaluating models over southern Africa. In UMFULA, she is investigating processes of change in future climate projections. She is a Research Fellow in Climate Modelling for Climate Services at the Environmental Change Institute, University of Oxford. In 2017 she will be based at University of Cape Town.

Ben Lamptey

IMPALA

Role: Researcher

Ben is a researcher at the The National Center for Atmospheric Research, part of the The University Corporation for Atmospheric Research which provides research, observing and computing facilities, and a variety of services for the atmospheric and related Earth sciences community. Ben has been working with the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model, the Community Land Model (CLM) as well as using datasets (both remotely sensed and in situ) for various analyses particularly over West Africa.

Sean Milton

IMPALA

Role: Co-Principal Investigator

Sean leads the Global Model Evaluation and Diagnostics section at the Met Office, developing the Global Atmosphere configurations of the Unified Model across all timescales. Sean focuses on i) diagnosing global model systematic errors and performance against observations ii) coordinating the trialling and pull through of improvements in model physics, dynamics, and resolution iii) developing new diagnostic techniques to understand the source of model systematic error growth iv) promoting development of the global NWP model.

Joseph Mutemi

IMPALA

Role: Researcher

Joseph is a lecturer at the University of Nairobi in the meteorology Department where he obtained his BSc, MSc and a Ph.D. His research interests lie in Weather and climate dynamics and physical modelling for weather and climate prediction deterministic models, global climate models, downscaling by dynamical and MOS schemes, development of multimodel ensemble developments for climate forecasts and change as well as applications to assessments and long-term sustainability of water resources and rain-fed food production in various parts of Kenya and Eastern Africa.

Douglas Parker

AMMA 2050, IMPALA

Role: Co-Principal Investigator

Doug is a lecturer in the School of Earth and Environment at Leeds University where he leads a strong research group studying climate dynamics of Africa, with a track record of collaborative work in the region. His research focuses on the physics and dynamics of weather systems, and their interaction with regional climate systems. Douglas holds an M.A. degree in Mathematics from the University of Cambridge and a Ph.D. in Meteorology from the University of Reading.

Wilfried Pokam

IMPALA, UMFULA

Role: Early Career Researcher

Wilfried is a lecturer at the University of Yaounde’s Department of Physics. His research interest is identifying key processes of climate variability in central Africa, mainly in the atmospheric water cycle, and analyse their representations in simulations of GCMs to assess the impact on climate change. His current focus is on water vapour transport and precipitation recycling for Equatorial Central Africa, emphasising seasonal cycle and inter-annual variability of the water vapour flux and precipitation recycling to identify dominant regulating factors of this variability.

Gabriel Rooney

IMPALA

Role: Climate Lead Researcher

Gabriel has been a member of Parametrizations since 2006 and prior to that spent several years working in Observations Based Research at the Met Office Research Unit at Cardington. He obtained his PhD on plume-flow modelling from DAMTP, University of Cambridge, following a maths degree from The Queen’s University of Belfast. Gabriel currently works on aspects of convection in the atmosphere, which includes atmospheric convection, as well as convective-type flow from other sources e.g. volcanic plumes.

Philip Stier

IMPALA

Role: Climate Lead

Philip is a Professor of Atmospheric Physics at the Department of Physics and a Fellow in Physics at Oriel College, University of Oxford. He heads the Climate Processes Group in Atmospheric, Oceanic and Planetary Physics of the Department of Physics at Oxford and is currently the academic coordinator of the Oxford Climate Research Network. His research addresses physical climate processes in the context of anthropogenic perturbations to the earth system as the underlying cause of climate change and air pollution.

Rachel Stratton

IMPALA

Role: Co-Principal Investigator

Rachel is a senior scientist working on convection, she is the convection scheme code owner and works on improving the convective parameterization scheme in the Unified Model. Rachel started at the Met Office in 1985, working for 5 years on ocean wave modelling, she then moved to the Met Office Hadley Centre in 1991 spending the first 2 years building the Unified Model and then focussing on Climate Model Evaluation and Development. Rachel holds a D.Phil in theoretical nuclear physics from Oxford University.

Andrew Turner

IMPALA

Role: Co-Principal Investigator

Andrew is a former NERC Fellow and now Lecturer in Monsoon Systems funded by the University of Reading’s Academic Investment Programme and NCAS-Climate. His general interests are in monsoon variability, predictability and prediction including the interaction between monsoon systems and other elements of the climate system. Andrew holds a Masters degree in Physics from Oxford University and a Ph.D. in Meteorology from the University of Reading.

Michael Vellinga

IMPALA

Role: Researcher

Michael works on making monthly-to-decadal forecasts over Africa better geared towards users and on the irreversible change in the meridional overturning circulation. His research focuses on multi-year changes of rainfall over the Sahel. His work aims to improve understanding of why many climate models fail to reproduce the magnitude of multi-year rainfall changes that have been observed over the Sahel in the 20th century. Increased understanding of model shortcomings will help to improve the climate models and increase confidence in forecasts of future climate change over the Sahel.

Simon Vosper

IMPALA

Role: Climate Lead

Simon joined the Met Office in 2001 as a research scientist. Simon completed a PhD on the behaviour of orographic internal gravity waves at the Department of Applied Mathematical Studies, University of Leeds in 1995. Following this, he worked as a postdoctoral research fellow on a number of projects at the University of Surrey and the University of Leeds, latterly funded by the NERC postdoctoral fellowship scheme. His experience includes participation in and coordination of field measurement programmes, fluid dynamical laboratory experiments and numerical modelling.

Steven Woolnough

IMPALA

Role: Co-Principal Investigator

Steven is a Principal Research Fellow in NCAS-Climate and Head of the NCAS-Climate Tropical Group. His research interests are in tropical climate variability, tropical convection and sub-seasonal to seasonal prediction. Current research is on the transitions between suppressed and active convection coupled to large-scale tropical circulations using novel approaches for parametrizing the large-scale dynamics and seasonal to decadal prediction for the improvement of European climate services.

Richard Washington

IMPALA, UMFULA

Role: Co-Principal Investigator

Richard Washington is Professor of Climate Science at the School of Geography and the Environment and Fellow of Keble College, Oxford. He specialises in African climate science and runs the African Climate research group. Richard’s research is concerned with the African climate systems, including climate change, the mechanisms leading to floods and drought and the way these characteristics of climate are represented in climate models. He has also worked on aerosols, particularly on dust storms in the central Sahara and in southern Africa.