Dr Terry Davies
Terry develops and maintains the atmospheric dynamical core of the Met Office's Unified Model.
Current activities
Terry's principal activity is the maintenance and development of the New dynamics for the UM configurations. Terry is the owner of the UM dynamics code. Improvements to the dynamics code are made to improve its performance for all UM configurations; for the 1.5 km model for the UK, the various regional models, the global forecast model and the climate model, HadGEM. As well as the scientific development of the code, its efficiency is important so Terry is interested in exploiting the increasing number of processing units now, and in the future, and using this experience to contribute to the design of future dynamical cores.
Career background
Terry studied Applied Mathematics and Computer Science at Sheffield University from 1969 to 1972. He then went to Liverpool University to undertake a PhD on Heat and Mass Transfer in Fluid Flow and joined the Met Office in 1975.
After initial training in Meteorology, Terry spent 18 months as an aviation forecaster at RAF Strike Command at High Wycombe. He returned to numerical modelling research in 1977 and spent the next few years developing the first global forecast model for the Met Office on its first (vector) supercomputer.
The global forecast model first became operational at the start of the Falklands war and by then Terry had become a senior forecaster in the Central Forecast Office (now the Operations Centre). Terry spent nearly five years as senior forecaster before returning again to Forecasting Research to begin development of the first UM.
From 1988, Terry spent four years at ECMWF where he was part of the team developing a semi-Lagrangian high-resolution version of the ECMWF model. Returning to Forecasting Research in 1992, Terry's first task was to mend the UM. This was followed by the development of the non-hydrostatic New Dynamics for the UM; the world's first non-hydrostatic global NWP and climate model, when it became operational in 2002.
Terry has been the Met Office representative for SRNWP since 1997 and a member of the PDEs on the Sphere organising committee since 2002.
External recognition
- L G Groves Memorial Prize for Meteorology, 1983
- L G Groves Memorial Prize for Meteorology, 2002
- Fellow of the Royal Meteorological Society
About Dr Terry Davies
Terry works in Dynamics Research
Areas of expertise:
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Numerical Weather Prediction.
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Meteorology.
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Numerical modelling.
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Scientific programming for high performance computers.
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Fluid dynamics.
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Climate modelling.
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Weather forecasting.
