Dr Carlo Cafaro

Areas of expertise

• Convective-scale ensembles forecasting
• Probabilistic forecast verification
• High-impact weather predictability
• Numerical weather prediction

Current activities

Carlo is a weather scientist currently investigating how updated global and regional science configurations impact the spread and skill of MOGREPS-UK. He is also involved in the verification of ensembles in South-East Asia as part of the WCSSP SE Asia project. Being part of the MetOffice@Reading community he also collaborates with researchers at the University of Reading.

Career background

Carlo's Publications

Carlo joined the Met Office in March 2022 to work in the convective-scale NWP group.

Before then, since June 2021, he worked for a private company in London as a senior meteorologist, producing and delivering medium and long-range weather forecasts for energy traders.

In January 2019 he started post-doctoral research at Department of Meteorology - University of Reading, as part of the GCRF African SWIFT project. His main tasks were to assess the performance of novel convection-permitting ensembles run by the Met Office for Tropical Africa and to deliver training to partners to increase forecasting capabilities in the countries involved in the Tropical Africa project.

In September 2014 he started a 4 year doctoral program as part of the Mathematics of Planet Earth | EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training (mpecdt.ac.uk),  a joint centre between Imperial College London and University of Reading, with the first year dedicated to an MRes and the following three years to a PhD. The MRes thesis (in 2015) was about “Extracting slow modes of atmospheric variability using conservation properties of fluid dynamics”. In  March 2019 he gained a PhD in Mathematics at the University of Reading. The title of his thesis is: “Information gain that convective-scale models bring to probabilistic weather forecasts”, it assesses the additional value brought by MOGREPS-UK with respect to a hybrid dynamical-statistical forecast driven by MOGREPS-G for sea breeze and wind gusts. During the PhD he spent 10 weeks at the Met Office for a summer internship project within the Atmospheric Processes and Parametrization group. The project was about developing novel numerical simulations of density currents to better understand  the dynamics of collision.

Prior to this, in January 2014, Carlo obtained a master degree in Mathematics at the Sapienza University of Rome with a thesis on the analytical properties of a fluid dynamics differential equation describing magma movement.