An external view of the Met Office building at night.

Dr Heather Rumbold (Ashton)

Heather works on land surface processes with a particular interest in hydrology

Areas of expertise

  • Land surface modelling

  • Soil hydrology

  • JULES

Publications by Heather

Current activities

Heather is a senior scientist working in the Boundary Layer & Surface Processes Team. Her main role is to develop and improve the Met Office land surface model (JULES) within the Unified Model. Recent activities include:

  • Developing and implementing new hydrological land surface parameterisations for inclusion in JULES. These include parameterisations for soil tiling and irrigation.
  • Heather is the JULES configuration manager, responsible for developing and maintaining the standalone physical land model configuration for both the Met Office and NERC systems. She is responsible for managing and overseeing the configuration development process and maintaining the comprehensive land benchmarking system.

Heather's publications

Career background

Heather joined the Met Office in April 2009 where she spent 3 years in the Hydro-Meteorological Forecasting Group at the Joint Centre of Hydrometeorological Research, Wallingford. She developed the offline MOSES-PDM (Met Office Surface Exchange Scheme - Probability Distributed Moisture) model within the UK Post Processing System (UKPP) to forecast rainfall, soil state and flooding. Prior to joining the Met Office Heather completed a PhD in meteorology jointly at Reading University and the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (CEH), Wallingford. Her PhD focused on modelling the coupling between the land surface and atmosphere using the JULES (based on MOSES, the land surface model used in the Unified Model). She was part of the Climate Modelling group at CEH and played an active part in the development of JULES.