Dr Nigel Wood
Nigel is the Met Office Principal Fellow for Next Generation Modelling Systems.
Current activities
Nigel is the Senior Science Supplier for the Met Office’s Next Generation Modelling Systems (NGMS) Programme. NGMS is one of the Met Office’s corporate strategic actions which aims to reformulate and redesign our complete weather and climate research and operational/production systems, including oceans and the environment, to allow us and our partners to fully exploit future generations of supercomputer for the benefits of society. He is also the Met Office Senior Science Supplier for the Exascale Computing ALgorithms & Infrastructures Benefiting UK Research (ExCALIBUR) Project which has similar aims to NGMS but applied more broadly across the UK’s supercomputing landscape. Both NGMS and ExCALIBUR are targeting application on supercomputers of the mid-2020s and beyond.
Career background
Nigel joined the Met Office in 1986, having just completed a degree in mathematics at Queens' College, Cambridge University. He was fortunate enough to then undertake a PhD, supervised jointly by Dr Paul Mason of the Met Office and Dr Alan Ibbetson of Reading University. The topic of his PhD was turbulent flow over three-dimensional hills, and the numerical model he developed as part of his PhD (BLASIUS) is still used within the Orography section of Atmospheric Processes and Parametrizations (APP) and elsewhere.
In 1995/96 Nigel spent six months at Météo-France, working on MESO-NH, their non-hydrostatic mesoscale model.
Nigel joined Dynamics Research in 1999 to help in both making the New Dynamics operational and documenting in detail all aspects of that dynamical core. This became operational in 2002 and it was then that Nigel's attention turned to the research and development for the ENDGame dynamical core which became operational in 2014.
In 2003 Nigel was awarded a Met Office Research Fellowship which he held until 2006 when he was appointed Head of Dynamics Research. In 2019 he moved to his current role as a Principal Fellow.
Nigel has co-supervised five PhD theses and examined two others. He was an Ordinary Member of Council of the Royal Meteorological Society 2000-2003 and was Associate Editor of the Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society 2001-2005.
External recognition
- Honorary Visiting Professor at Exeter University
- Buchan Prize 2010 (Royal Meteorological Society)
- L G Groves Memorial Prize for Meteorology 2002
- Fellow of the Royal Meteorological Society
About Dr Nigel Wood
Nigel Wood is the Principal Fellow for Next Generation Modelling Systems.
Areas of expertise:
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Numerical analysis.
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Semi-implicit semi-Lagrangian numerical methods.
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Coupling the physics and dynamics together.
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The deep-atmosphere non-hydrostatic governing dynamical equations.