Category Archives: Climate

Using deep learning to observe river levels using river cameras

Posted on 15 February, 2021 by danaallen

By: Sarah Dance In recent times, machine learning is being increasingly used to make sense of digital data. In environmental science, we are only at the beginning of this journey (Blair et al 2021). However, we have already found one … Continue reading →

Posted in Climate, Flooding, Machine Learning | Leave a comment

Why do clouds matter when we measure surface temperature from space?

Posted on 8 February, 2021 by danaallen

By: Claire Bulgin We can use satellites up in space to measure the surface temperature of the Earth over the land and sea.  Satellites have now been making measurements for 40+ years and these data are really helpful for understanding … Continue reading →

Posted in Climate, Clouds, Remote sensing | Leave a comment

Weather forecasts to save species

Posted on 1 February, 2021 by timpoulter

by Vicky Boult Extreme weather events impact the lives and livelihoods of people all over the world, a story we hear more and more often as climate change increases the frequency and severity of weather events. But as climate change … Continue reading →

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What’s that data? Why and how the geoscientific community is forging metadata standards.

Posted on 25 January, 2021 by timpoulter

By Sadie Bartholomew Part I: Why Earth science is a data-driven endeavour. Advanced simulations of the Earth system, whose configurations are themselves complex controlled data, churn out petabytes of analysis datasets whilst raw data from in-situ and satellite observations stream … Continue reading →

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All I want for Christmas is some PV maps…

Posted on 21 December, 2020 by timpoulter

By: Ben Harvey For many years, the department webpages have hosted real-time plots of large-scale atmospheric conditions based on operational ECMWF analysis data. Over the last few months we’ve been revamping them with a new webpage and higher-resolution images. I … Continue reading →

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Here comes the rain again…

Posted on 14 December, 2020 by timpoulter

By: Natalie Harvey British people are well renowned for their obsession for talking about the weather. This is partly because it is a “safe” topic for conversation and partly because it is really fascinating! This is especially true in the … Continue reading →

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Improving Hydrological Predictions Of Land System Models

Posted on 7 December, 2020 by danaallen

By: Thibault Hallouin Given the existence of feedbacks between the Earth’s atmosphere and the Earth’s surface, hydrological knowledge (e.g. soil moisture and open water available for evaporation and plant transpiration) is as critical to atmospheric scientists, as meteorological knowledge is … Continue reading →

Posted in Climate, Hydrology, Urban meteorology | Leave a comment

Sources of rainfall over East Asia

Posted on 9 November, 2020 by danaallen

By: Liang Guo The East Asian monsoon causes intense rainfall over China, Japan and the Koreas every summer, and a cold, dry season every winter. This is driven by thermal and dynamical contrasts between the vast Pacific Ocean and the … Continue reading →

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Tropical rainfall and sea surface temperature link could improve forecasts

Posted on 2 November, 2020 by danaallen

By: Chris Holloway  and the University of Reading Press Office.  Tropical rainfall, averaged on seasonal time scales, is influenced far more strongly by nearby sea temperatures in the real world than in almost all climate simulations, scientists have found, paving … Continue reading →

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The Core-cloak Convection Model

Posted on 26 October, 2020 by danaallen

By: Jian-Feng Gu Moist convection plays a fundamental role in large-scale circulations and climate, ranging from cumulus clouds smaller than 100m to organized weather systems of several thousands of kilometers. Limited by their grid spacing, numerical models are not able … Continue reading →

Posted in Climate, Clouds, Convection, Numerical modelling | Leave a comment