An external view of the Met Office building at night.

Dr Daniel Lea

Developing and maintaining the assimilation part of the FOAM (Forecasting Ocean Assimilation Model) operational deep ocean forecasting system.

Areas of expertise

  • Data assimilation techniques (OI, 3D-Var, 4D-Var)
  • All aspects of the operational FOAM ocean forecasting system including verification and validation
  • NEMOVAR
  • Altimeter observation bias and model bias correction
  • The NEMO ocean modelling system
  • Coupled data assimilation

Publications by Daniel Lea

Current activities

Daniel is partly responsible for maintenance and development of the data assimilation component of the FOAM system. This includes the data assimilation code itself, NEMOVAR, and the assimilation interface to the NEMO ocean model. Daniel is also responsible for some aspects of the observation processing needed for FOAM, in particular the altimeter data.

Daniel is currently working on a number of projects. These include work to adapt a coupled ocean-atmosphere-land-sea ice data assimilation system to run as a demonstration operational system. Other current work is to develop a large scale error covariance model to enable NEMOVAR to get the most out of sparse historical data. There is also ongoing collaborative work with the University of Reading and the University of Bristol on the use of GOCE data in data assimilation.

Career background

Daniel has worked in Ocean Forecasting Research and Development for six years. Highlights include:

  • Leading the project to develop a coupled ocean-atmosphere-land-sea data assimilation system.
  • Implementing an altimeter bias correction scheme in FOAM.
  • Running near real time observing system experiments in FOAM.

Developing a comprehensive operational monitoring system which has lead to many improvements to the FOAM system.

Before that, from 2005 to 2007, he was a visiting scientist to Ocean Forecasting Research and Development from ESSC (University of Reading) working on altimeter bias correction and assimilation of data on density levels. From 2002 to 2005 he worked at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore on 4D-Var in a high resolution regional ocean model. Daniel's PhD work at the University of Oxford (1997 to 2001) was on 4D-Var assimilation of SST and SSH data into simplified high resolution ocean models.