Dr Franco Marenco

Areas of expertise

• The in-house exploitation of near real-time (NRT) spaceborne lidar products; and
• The leadership and scientific analysis of airborne campaigns using the FAAM BAe146 aircraft.

Franco is the author of more than 50 peer-reviewed scientific publications:

Publications by Franco Marenco

Current activities

Franco's group develops derived products for nowcasting imagery in the fields of cloud properties, the identification of convective systems, mineral dust, volcanic ash and sulphur dioxide. The imagery is directly available to forecasters in the Met Office Operations Centre; moreover, the products we generate feed directly into the data assimilation for the Global and UK versions of the Met Office Unified Model (MetUM), into our aviation nowcasting systems, and into the initialisation of the NAME dispersion model.

Career background

Franco has been a researcher at the following institutions, with a focus on remote sensing and atmospheric aerosols:

• The University of Rome "La Sapienza"
• The "Aristotle" University of Thessaloniki
• ESA-ESTEC
• IFA-CNR (now ISAC-CNR)
• The Italian Space Agency
• ENEA
• The Observations Based Research section at the Met Office
• The Satellite Applications section at the Met Office