Dr Huw Lewis

Areas of expertise

• Km-scale model development and evaluation
• Regional coupled environmental prediction
• Use of observations for model evaluation
• Boundary-layer meteorology

Publications by Huw Lewis

Current activities

Huw leads the Regional Model Development & Evaluation group of scientists and scientific software engineers. The team are engaged with development, evaluation and application of cutting-edge model configurations aimed at improving delivery of weather and climate prediction at km-scale and sub-km grid model resolutions.

Current research areas include:

• Developing and evaluating km-scale prediction capabilities, focussed on UK and international weather and climate applications.
• Developing regional environmental prediction frameworks to represent coupled interactions between atmosphere, land, ocean and other marine ecosystem components for multi-hazard and climate prediction.
• Advancing ensemble urban-scale prediction using physics-based and machine learning approaches.
• Exploring the frontiers of global km-scale prediction for weather, climate and training data driven methods.
• Development of tools and workflows to support and enhance flexible deployment and evaluation of regional and km-scale models for research and application.

Career background

Huw joined the Met Office in 2006. His first position was working in the Radar Products team, primarily focused on improving the quantitative accuracy of radar precipitation observations. Huw then joined the Satellite Applications team working with observations derived from the GPS radio occultation technique.  Huw's work focused on collaborating with other scientists as part of the GRAS SAF project team. Between 2010 and 2013, Huw held the post of Private Secretary to the Chief Scientist, working in support of Prof. Dame Julia Slingo OBE FRS.

He has since been engaged in aspects of regional model development and evaluation. Much of this time was spent leading the research to couple high-resolution regional atmosphere, land, ocean and wave capabilities through the Regional Environmental Prediction collaboration across the Met Office with UK partners. He became Head RMED in 2020.

Huw completed a PhD at the University of Leeds, investigating the dynamics of boundary layer flows over steep terrain. As part of his PhD work, Huw took part in a field campaign measuring wind and turbulence over a steep ridge in the Swiss Alps. As an undergraduate, Huw studied Physics with Meteorology at the University of Edinburgh.