An external view of the Met Office building at night.

Dr Breo Gomez

Areas of expertise

  • Land surface data assimilation

Current activities

Breo has developed a Land Surface Data Assimilation (LSDA) system for the UK that became operational at the end of 2019. This system replicates the approach used in the Global model by ingesting ASCAT soil wetness and screen pseudo observations into an Extended Kalman Filter at an hourly frequency.   One key difference from the Global LSDA implantation is that screen data is provided by the output of the atmospheric 4DVAR fields, effectively coupling the atmospheric and land analyses in a stronger way than the more common weak approach.  

Breo is also working on improving the screen temperature forecast through the land state.  One approach is to expand the current set of analysis variables provided by the LSDA system to include soil temperature, skin temperature and snow temperature (currently only soil moisture is used). Another approach is to improve the ASCAT observation processing to account for biases.

Career Background

Breo undertook his higher education at the University of Santiago de Compostela, where he gained a BSc in Physics in 2002, followed by an MSc in Non-Linear Physics in 2004. In 2019, he finished his PhD studies, where he investigated the impact of Spectral Nudging on Limited Area Models.

In 2002 he also started to work as an atmospheric modeller at MeteoGalicia, where he worked on various topics related to operational numerical weather forecasts, with a particular emphasis on ensemble forecasting. From 2009 to 2010, Breo worked  on assimilating radiance data with the LETKF scheme at the Data Assimilation Department at DWD, with a focus on the localisation. In 2010 he returned to MeteoGalicia, where he was appointed as manager of Numerical Prediction soon after. There he was responsible for managing atmospheric, waves and hydrodynamic operational forecasting, with a strong focus on high resolution modelling and customer-user needs. In 2015 he joined the MetOffice to work on Land Surface Data Assimilation.