Areas of expertise:

•  Soil moisture diagnosis 
• River flow modelling 
• Atmospheric model parametrizations 
• Model development 
• Management of scientific staff and projects

Current activities:

The current focus of Roderick's work is on the diagnosis and prediction of surface and subsurface hydrological quantities such as soil moisture, evaporation, snowmelt, runoff and river flow.  

He collaborates with hydrologists at CEH. This has enabled MOSES to represent sub-grid scale soil moisture heterogeneity by incorporating CEH's PDM. Roderick led the project to implement the combined MOSES-PDM within the Met Office's UKPP system. High resolution soil characteristics and land cover data together with analyses of atmospheric variables are used to drive MOSES-PDM. Hourly values of snowmelt, runoff, net surface radiation, evaporation (actual and potential), soil temperature and moisture are calculated on a 2km grid.

Further collaboration with CEH enabled a prototype RFM to be coupled with MOSES-PDM so that surface and subsurface runoffs are routed over land and down river channels. Roderick managed a recent contract with CEH which delivered river flow paths and associated ancillary fields for areas of current military deployment. These will used with the RFM coupled to the South Asian CAM to enable prediction of river flow and areas of likely flooding.

Roderick has led consultancy work for the  Environment Agency to determine how and with what confidence they can use the products from UKPP-MOSES-PDM.

Roderick has most recently investigated the main sources of error in the UKPP-MOSES-PDM products and helped to determine a strategy for either combining or replacing the existing UKPP-based surface hydrology products with a land surface data assimilation scheme.  

Career background:

Roderick has been in his current job since the Joint Centre for Hydro-Meteorological Research was set up in late 1999. Prior to that he led work in boundary layer and orography parametrization. Work in this role involved the implementation and testing within the Met Office Unified Model of a boundary layer entrainment parametrization developed by colleagues in Atmospheric Processes and Parametrizations (Adrian Lock and Andy Brown).

Before that Roderick led work to develop an operational mesoscale NWP model during which he implemented a parametrization of orographic roughness developed by colleagues in Atmospheric Processes and Parametrizations (Paul Mason, Nigel Wood and Alan Grant).

In the late 1980s and early 1990s Roderick was part of the team which designed, coded and tested the first version of the Met Office Unified Model. He was particularly responsible for the sections which represented surface and boundary layer processes and large scale cloud and precipitation.

Prior to the MetUM Roderick developed a large scale cloud water and precipitation scheme for the climate model. As a result of this work, the Met Office's climate model was one of the first which carried a prognostic cloud water variable and used this in calculating cloud radiative properties.

Roderick started his Met Office career by developing and implementing a boundary layer turbulence scheme for the Met Office's first operational mesoscale NWP model. This parametrization used a prognostic turbulent kinetic energy.