Alasdair Skea

Areas of expertise

  • Data post-processing
  • Energy applications
  • Surface transport
  • Production process design

Publications by Alasdair Skea

Current activities

Alasdair manages the Post-Processing Applications team which develops and delivers products to help our industry customers manage the impact of weather on their business.

The team supports a range of services across industry sectors, including Surface Transport, Marine, Energy and Retail. Recent team project highlights are working with renewable energy companies to improve generation forecasts from their assets, collaborating with National Grid to develop solar irradiance forecasting techniques and to study how network resilience and efficiency are affected by weather, and developing a new probabilistic surface transport forecasting capability.

Alasdair also manages a programme of scientific research and technical developments, utilising the Met Office's world-leading scientific capability, to increase the efficiency of the production process and provide the best quality service to our customers. This uses cloud computing technologies and addresses big data problems related to meteorological datasets.

Career background

Alasdair has been managing the Post-Processing Applications team since 2015.

Before this, Alasdair managed the Renewables Applications team from 2012 to 2015, leading the development of new services for wind and solar energy applications and multiple consultancy projects. His previous experience focused on developing techniques to add site-specific forecast skill to our Met Office Numerical Weather Prediction models output and on developing bespoke products and services for the Met Office's customers. Alasdair was responsible for the maintenance and development of the Met Office Road Surface Temperature model (MORST) which is the primary data source for a range of Surface Transport products, and for developing site-specific applications which provide a range of forecasts for thousands of locations around the world.

Alasdair joined the Met Office in 2002 as a research scientist after finishing a degree in Physics at Durham University. He later completed an MSc in Weather, Climate and Numerical modelling at the University of Reading whilst working in the local forecasting research and development group.