An external view of the Met Office building at night.

Dr Marco Milan

Marco is a data assimilation scientist who works predominantly on improvements to the Met Office Convective Scale Data Assimilation system.

 

Current activities

Marco works on the implementation of a Moisture Incrementing Operator which takes into account the new CASIM microphysics scheme.

He is involved in the coding of the global hybrid 4D-VAR scheme in the Next Generation DA (NGDA) framework

Marco's publications

 

Previous Met Office activities

In 2015 Marco joined the Met Office to work in the Convective Scale Data Assimilation group (now Convective Scale Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP)). Since he joined the Met Office he has been involved in different projects in collaboration with different teams (particularly Regional Model Evaluation and Development (RMED) and Satellite and Surface Assimilation (SSA)), for example:

  • Implementation of the Large-Scale Blending (LSB) scheme, currently operational.
  • Development of the variational grid in the NGDA framework.
  • Testing a hybrid version for the hourly 4D-Var system..
  • Testing the moisture incrementing operator.
  • Implementation of the 1d-Var Bmatrix for satellite instruments.
  • Optimization of the Jc term (used for gravity wave control).
  • Definition of a new Perturbation Forecast (PF) model resolution for the UKV.
  • Definition of the cut-off time for hourly 4D-Var.

Career Background

In July 2011 he moved to the Meteorological Institute of the University of Vienna, where he was involved in post-doctoral research in collaboration with ECMWF on the reanalysis of meteorological data, particularly homogenization of radiosonde temperature data using a variational approach (VarBC).  During his collaboration with the University of Vienna he was supervisor of the "Exercise for statistic in meteorology" and the "Exercise for programming in meteorology".

From July 2004 until January 2010 he gained his PhD in Meteorology at the University of Bonn (in data assimilation). The title of his thesis is: "Physical initialisation of precipitation in a mesoscale numerical weather forecast model". Between 2010 and July 2011 he continued his post-doctoral research at the University of Bonn. He was involved in two projects; the first one, in collaboration with ESA, the second one was about the development of a sequential assimilation method for ensemble prediction systems based on particle filters. During this time he was also co-supervisor of data assimilation seminars and laboratory courses.

He had his first working experience from 2002 to 2004 at Arpae Emilia Romagna, where his main activity was programming in IDL for radar data visualisation and writing reports about radar data quality and meteorological events.

Marco gained his master degree in Applied Physics at the University of Padua in 2002. With a thesis on "Application of a non-hydrostatic meteorological model at an extreme rainy event"

External activities

Since 2022, Marco has been a member of the Expert Team on Data Assimilation and Use of Observations of the Short-Range Numerical Weather Prediction Programme of EUMETNET.