Maths professor joins Met Office Academic Partnership with programme expansion
A doctor from the School of Mathematics is among four Leeds colleagues appointed to the Met Office Academic Partnership (MOAP), enhancing the group's climate modelling expertise.
Dr Lorenzo Tomassini will join Dr Steve Abel, Dr Tim Andrews, and Dr Camilla Mathison to facilitate collaborations with the Met Office and deliver research, innovation, and impact in climate science, impacts and mitigation, modelling, and machine learning.
Following his degree in Mathematics and a PhD in Mathematical Physics at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), Dr Tomassini moved into environmental sciences, initially working on uncertainty quantification in climate modelling.
He joined the Global Atmospheric Model Development group of the Met Office in 2015.
The group develops the global atmospheric model that the Met Office uses across a wide range of time and spatial scales. Dr Tomassini is mainly engaged in creating a km-scale-resolution, convection-permitting configuration of that global model, but is also interested in linking with data scientists at Leeds and using machine learning techniques to solve problems in atmospheric and climate science.
Dr Tomassini said: “Steep advances in computational capabilities and data science are revolutionising weather and climate science.
“Together with Met Office and University of Leeds scientists, we aim at combining ultra-high resolution numerical modelling and data science techniques at the forefront of this revolution, engaging with international initiatives such as the World Climate Research Programme Lighthouse Activity on Digital Earths.”
With the new posts, the MOAP is now active across the Schools of Earth and Environment, Mathematics, Geography, Chemistry, Computer Science, and Business School.
Professor John Marsham, Met Office Joint Chair at Leeds, said: “The climate crisis and the ongoing technological revolution of artificial intelligence and machine-learning means that there is growing urgency to not only deliver on core weather and climate science, but to work across disciplines to deliver solutions, and effectively use rapidly developing new technologies. MOAP has greatly benefited Leeds and the Met Office, and we expect opportunities from MOAP to continue to grow across campus.”
About the Met Office Academic Partnership
The University of Leeds is a founding member of the Met Office Academic Partnership and funds the roles as part of its strategic investment in MOAP. MOAP offers growing opportunities across disciplines, and a fifth post for the School of Computer Science is in development.
