Are you an ambitious researcher with a passion for the weather? Do you want to further your career as part of a large and dynamic research group in climate and atmospheric science, working in collaboration with the Met Office?

UMBRELLA (UM Boundary Layer Representation with Land-Atmosphere Interactions) is a project funded by the Natural Environment Research Council as part of the directed programme on "Improving model representation of turbulent atmospheric processes" joint with the Met Office. The overarching aim of the programme is to improve the representation of turbulent processes in the next generation of km and sub-km scale weather and climate models. Within the programme UMBRELLA will:

The post-holder will work closely with other members of the project team at the Universities of Leeds and Reading and the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, as well as with other projects funded within the programme and with the Met Office. This post will focus primarily on the effects of surface variability on the boundary layer and on the coupling of the boundary layer to moist convection using both idealised large-eddy simulations as well as case studies with the UM. Observations from Wescon and other field campaigns and long term observations will be used to evaluate the models at various resolutions. As atmospheric models are moving toward the sub-km scale they will begin to resolve large scale boundary structures. This breaks some of the underlying assumptions of boundary layer parametrisations. The aim of this project is to understand the key processes controlling the coupling of the boundary layer and convection over variable surfaces in order to improve parametrisation of both the boundary layer and convection across a range of model resolutions. 

Based in the Institute of Climate and Atmospheric Science in the School of Earth and Environment you will join a large dynamic research community with internationally recognised expertise in atmospheric dynamics and convection. As one of the founder members of the Met Office Academic Partnership, Leeds has a long-standing and close collaboration with the Met Office and the post-holder will work closely with them to ensure pull-through of the research to operations.

To explore the post further or for any queries you may have, please contact:

Dr Andrew Ross, Associate Professor in Dynamical Meteorology

Email: [email protected]