At the Data Assimilation Research Centre, University of Reading (UK)a PhD studentship on “Numerical Weather Prediction of High-Impact Weather”is available. Please see details below.

Numerical Weather Prediction of High-Impact Weather
Supervisors: Dr Stefano Migliorini, Dr Ross Bannister, Prof. AlanO’Neill, Dr Mark Dixon, and Sue Ballard
Location: Department of Meteorology, University of Reading

Improving predictions of hazardous weather is currently one of the main challenges foroperational meteorological centres. Such phenomena often impact on very localised regions(as in the case of the Boscastle flood in 2004) and current operational models do not haveenough spatial resolution for predicting them reliably and with the required accuracy.

The Met Office is currently experimenting with 4 km and 1.5 km spatial resolution versionsof the Unified Model over a limited spatial region. This can potentially lead toimprovements in forecasts of severe convective storms, which may lead to hazardous eventssuch as flooding.

However, many difficulties still need to be addressed on how observational informationis combined with model data, a process called data assimilation. The focus of this PhDproject will be to investigate the applicability of an advanced data assimilationframework, called Ensemble Kalman Filter, to convective-scale data assimilationfor a high-resolution version of the Unified Model.

For further details about the project please see
http://www.met.rdg.ac.uk/phd/topics/descriptions/darc2.pdf
and then contact Dr Stefano Migliorini (s.migliorini@reading.ac.uk)if you have any further questions.

For details of how to apply for the PhD project go to
http://www.met.rdg.ac.uk/phd/topics/