An external view of the Met Office building at night.

Dr Heather Rumbold (Ashton)

Areas of expertise

  • Land surface modelling

  • Soil hydrology

  • JULES

Publications by Heather

Current activities

Heather is a scientist working in the Land Surface Processes Team. She works on the development of soil hydrology in the Met Office's land surface model, JULES.

Heather's current work is focused on including soil heterogeneity in JULES by introducing high resolution soil processes. The aim of this work is to investigate whether the inclusion of soil heterogeneity will improve model simulations over Central USA and continental Europe during summertime.

Heather is also involved in the UK Environmental Prediction Prototype Project which is bringing together existing atmosphere, marine, hydrological and land surface modelling components to demonstrate the UK coupled environmental prediction concept in research mode. This project involves close collaboration with CEH , NOC and many others.

Career background

Heather joined the Met Office in April 2009 where she spent 3 years in the Hydro Met team developing models and post processing systems for forecasting 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.