Christopher Thomas
Chris works on improving data assimilation in the Met Office global atmospheric model.
Areas of expertise
- Data assimilation
- Inverse modelling
- Uncertainty quantification
Current activities
Chris is working in the Assimilation of Surface-based Observations group based at MetOffice@Reading Unit at the Department of Meteorology, University of Reading. His current work is focused on improving the assimilation of sondes into the Met Office global atmospheric model. This has included an investigation into the optimal methodology to account for horizontal sonde drift and will also focus on the incorporation of dropsondes and sonde descents into the assimilation. He is also working on the development of next-generation observation processing code as part of the Joint Effort for Data assimilation Integration (JEDI) framework.
Career background
Prior to working at the Met Office, Chris was a postdoc at the University of Reading working on ocean data assimilation, including the incorporation of novel data into high-resolution models, and the inverse modelling of the Earth's energy and water cycles. Before that, he was a PhD student and postdoc in particle physics at the University of Oxford. As a member of The Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) experiment at The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), his work included high-precision measurements of various parameters in the Standard Model of particle physics, aiming to improve our understanding of matter-antimatter asymmetries in the universe.