Areas of expertise:

• Ground based radar remote sensing.

• Orographic enhancement modelling.

• Interference detection in radar images.

• Assessing radar site data quality.

Current activities

The primary focus of Selena's work is the implementation of a new orographic enhancement model.

Gauge data in upland regions is sparse and small catchments in these areas present problems relating to flood forecasting. It is therefore important that radar measurements of rainfall rate are as accurate as possible and account for the effects of orographic enhancements well.

The aim of her project is to apply an improved version of Alpert and Shafir's model to all radar based products. This model uses 1km topography and boundary layer wind, temperature and humidity fields as input. It is currently running in real time on a trial basis, and is due to be implemented operationally in March 2010.

The use of this model will allow the corrections to be determined at higher spatial resolution and for the integration of additional model input fields in the future. This project is being carried out in collaboration with the Environment Agency and the Flood Forecasting Centre.

On completion of this project, Selena's work will become increasingly focused on the integration of variational methods in radar processing and the quality monitoring of radar products for NWP.

Career background

Selena has been a member of the Met Office Radar Products team since 2008 after completing an MSc in Remote Sensing and Image Processing at Edinburgh University.

Her dissertation was based on determining the depth of supra-glacial lakes in Greenland by their remotely sensed reflectance. As an undergraduate, Selena completed an MPhys in Computational Physics at Heriot Watt University.