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CEMAC Staff

CEMAC Leadership

CEMAC Director: Juliane Schwendike is interested in tropical meteorology, tropical cyclones, convection and high impact weather, monsoons, large-scale circulations. She spends 20% of her time directing the CEMAC activity.

CEMAC Technical Head: Mark Richardson.  Mark is full time and has the role of managing the day to day activities of the SDS. He liaises with academics while they are preparing proposals. If you are considering adding CEMAC time to a proposal that you are preparing, then please contact Mark at the earliest opportunity. He can help you gauge the amount of CEMAC effort you might need and when there will be resource to support it.

Software Development Scientists

Helen Burns. Helen Joined CEMAC from her PhD on Oceanography at Southampton and has a wide range of computational skills. She has developed jupyter notebooks to instruct on Machine Learning techniques, developed configurations for running nested models using the MetOffice Unified Model and WRF. Helen has also completed projects that use Python flasks with a Web user interface to display data and allow users to explore other connections in the data.

Richard Rigby. Joined CEMAC from BAS and has long time experience in Unix systems administration and software deployment. He also works on projects where complex detailed processing techniques allow the researchers to view their data and explore derived parameters in a visual manner. Often through web portals using Java script and plotly. Richard also provides responsive support for many School technical questions on research computing.

Cameron Wilson has long-term experience in computational modelling using finite element analysis and Fortran, previously applied to studying bone fracture healing. His current work is addressing bottlenecks in the parallel computing performance of a complex, Fortran-based geophysical model. He also uses Python for data-wrangling and developing web-based user interfaces, e.g. for data visualisation.

Anne Barber Anne joined CEMAC in January 2024 with an industry background in operational weather forecasting at the Met Office and catastrophe flood modelling at JBA Risk Management. She has experience running General Circulation Models, Cloud-Resolving Models and Catastrophe Risk Models in High Performance Computing environments, as well as data analysis and visualisation skills using Python and QGIS.

Julia Crook Julia joined CEMAC in January 2024, having been a Postdoctoral Researcher at Leeds since 2012 and having previously been in software development in industry for 16 years. She has long time experience of programming in C, C++, IDL and Python in a linux environment. She has experience of running the Met Office Unified Model in both global and regional configurations, and experience of model and satellite data analysis and visualisation. She has worked on several projects involving the tracking of tropical storms and vortices.

Donald Cummins joined CEMAC in February 2024 as a machine-learning specialist, having previously developed data-driven turbulence parametrizations at the Centre National de Recherches Météorologiques (CNRM) in Toulouse, France. His academic background is in mathematics and statistics. Donald’s research interests include attribution of climate change, the development of simple climate models (e.g. FaIR), and the emerging field of climate econometrics.

Jonathan Elsey: Jon joined CEMAC from Cardiff University in August 2024, after completing a PhD and several postdoctoral positions in atmospheric spectroscopy and radiative transfer at the University of Reading. He is currently working on two primarily Fortran-based projects: NG-ARCH, in which he is working to accelerate the UKCA aerosol model using GPUs, and Dynamo, in which he is identifying performance bottlenecks in a complex geophysical model of planetary cores.

Science Domain Experts

Zhiqiang Cui: his research involves cloud microphysics and studies of various clouds, their interaction with aerosol, and precipitation.; based in NCAS.

Dan Grosvenor: Aerosol processes. Dan has worked with CASIM, a sophisticated cloud aerosol scheme that is integrated with the MetOffice Unified Model (UM). Currently he is researching the representation of low-level clouds and developing a test-bed to assess this within climate models such as the UKESM. The tool uses a variety of sources of practical observations for the assessment.

Richard Keane: Convection and Atmospheric dynamics; joint Met Office. He is currently investigating systematic biases in the Met Office Unified Model for the Indian summer monsoon across a range of time scales, including running higher-resolution limited-area simulations to help understand the global model. His research interests include atmospheric convection, tropical meteorology, global model evaluation and probabilistic forecasting.

Julia Tindall:  Paleoclimatology.  Julia’s research involves using models to simulate climates of the past.  She is currently working on modelling the Pliocene climate (~3Ma) although she has extensive experience in modelling other time periods.  Within CEMAC Julia provides advice on how to set up and debug the Hadley Climate Model based on the MetOffice Unified Model (UM) for paleoclimate research.  She can also advise on how to change the code within this model to output additional diagnostics. These special variations of traditional climate models allow scientists to simulate tens of thousands of years in practical real world time scales.