An external view of the Met Office building at night.

Dr Dingmin Li

Dingmin works on improving high-resolution data assimilation in the Convective-scale NWP group and is based at the MetOffice@Reading Unit in the Department of Meteorology, University of Reading.

Areas of expertise

  • General and variational bias corrections in assimilation of various satellite observations.
  • Global and limited-area NWP suite systems.
  • OPS (Observation Processing System) and VAR (variational data assimilation) systems and their coding.
  • Research and experiments using the Unified Model (UM).

Current activities

Dingmin is currently working on a WCSSP (Weather and Climate Science for Service Partnership Programme) project to develop a limited-area high resolution data assimilation and forecast system for the South Asia area, based on the 4D-Var system of the UKV model.  Dingmin is also involved in the maintenance and development of the Crisis Area Models (CAMs) for the Defence customer.

Past experiences and projects in the Met Office

Dingmin was one of the main contributors to the development of the Met Office's hourly cycling UKV 4D-Var high resolution (model 1.5km and 4D-Var 3.3km) data assimilation and forecast system, which was successfully implemented operationally in July 2017.

Dingmin was also a main contributor in the design, coding and implementation of the variational bias correction scheme in the Met Office's 4D-Var data assimilation system for assimilation of satellite data. With efforts and innovations from colleagues in the Satellite Application division, the scheme showed very significant improvements to the global UM model forecasts and was accepted for operational implementation in March 2016. 

Career background

Dingmin joined the Met Office in 1998, having previously worked as a research scientist in the Meteorology Department at Reading University since 1991, after completing a PhD in Stratospheric Dynamics at Edinburgh University. His research prior to the Met Office involved mainly radiative modelling and stratospheric modelling.

Dingmin's first job at the Met Office was data assimilation in global NWP model systems, where he was responsible for the construction and testing of Met Office operational suite control systems to implement 3D-Var/4D-Var together with the “New Dynamics” UM model. In 2003, Dingmin moved to work on assimilating satellite observed infrared observations into high-resolution models. Dingmin moved to ECMWF in 2008 on secondment, working on satellite data assimilation and bias correction, coming back to the Met Office in 2010, working on VarBC and high- resolution data assimilation. Other research since 2010 included support to colleagues in the collaborating universities for various collaboration projects, for example, DIAMET (DIAbatic influences on Mesoscale structures in ExTratropical storms) and FRANC (Forecasting Rainfall exploiting new data Assimilation techniques and Novel observations of Convection).