Dr Lewis Ireland

Lewis is a Senior Scientist in the Industry Science & Consultancy team, working to develop solutions for sectors impacted by weather and climate.

Areas of expertise

  • Weather pattern generation and post-processing
  • High-impact weather events

Publications by Dr Lewis Ireland

Current activities

Lewis is working on developing a set of representative weather patterns for South Africa that can be utilised in medium-range impact-based forecasting of heatwave events. Research includes generating and identifying weather patterns that heighten the risk of high-impact heatwaves, conducting assessment of optimal heatwave metrics and their ability to predict these events, and assessing the forecast skill of these patterns.

Career background

Before joining the Met Office in November 2021, Lewis obtained his PhD in Astrophysics from the University of Exeter in 2018 and was an Astrophysics Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Exeter, where he published several lead-authored peer-reviewed articles covering the evolutionary impact of heat transport in the interior of stars and the interaction between young stars and their circumstellar disks. He also completed a Data Science Fellowship at the Science to Data Science (S2DS) bootcamp in 2018, acquiring knowledge of data science commercial tools and techniques.