Areas of expertise

• The Met Office Unified Model System.
• Fortran 90/95 programming.
• Parallel programming with MPI.
• High Performance Computing.
• Numerical Modelling

Current activities

Sean is a senior scientific software engineer working on the Unified Model Technical Infrastructure and is a member of the Unified Model System Development team. This includes both routine Unified Model release work and longer term system development work.

Stable releases of the Unified Model occur about three times per year. Many code developers contribute to each release, so an extensive program of integration testing is required, which is carried out by the Unified Model System Development team. Sean's work in this area involves overseeing the integration testing process, as well as actually carrying out some of the integration testing. Other routine tasks include reviewing code changes submitted by code developers and updating the Unified Model code to current coding standards.

Unified Model system development projects which Sean has contributed to (during 2007-2010) include

• Migration of the Unified Model to the IBM supercomputer.
• The FLUME project (Flexible Unified Model Environment) which aims to restructure UM architecture to achieve a clear separation of control and science functionality.
• Implementation of the  JULES land surface scheme in the UM.
• Other improvements to the Unified Model top level control code.

Career background

Sean joined the Met Office in 1993. He has worked in a number of research and development areas. This included ten years as a member of the Joint Centre for Mesoscale Meteorolgy at University of Reading, where he worked on various Data Assimilation projects. He moved to his current post at Met Office Exeter in 2007.

Before joining the Met Office Sean did a PhD in Computational Fluid Dynamics at Teesside University, and also did BSc and MSc degrees in physics and mathematical physics at the Universities of Manchester and Liverpool. He also spent several years as a teacher in secondary and further education, and had periods in the nuclear power industry and the microelectronics industry.