The 10th NAME User Workshop

The Met Office welcomed nearly 80 participants to a hybrid workshop to discuss recent developments and applications of the NAME atmospheric dispersion model.

The workshop was organised by members of the Atmospheric Dispersion and Air Quality group and brought together new and experienced users and model developers of the Met Office's atmospheric dispersion model NAME. The event provides a platform for sharing research and other model-related information, networking and strengthening links. This year the workshop was mainly held in-person to facilitate networking, but with online access to the oral sessions for those unable to travel. Participants attended from academia, government organisations, research institutions and commercial companies, both from within the UK and globally.

The NAME model and user community

The Numerical Atmospheric-Dispersion Modelling Environment (NAME) is a Lagrangian-Eulerian model developed by the Met Office to simulate the dispersion of a wide range of airborne pollutants from dispersion events such as nuclear accidents, volcanic eruptions, chemical accidents, smoke plumes from fires, and airborne animal and plant disease spread. In recent years, the NAME user community has seen continuous growth and the first user workshop was established in 2014. This years workshop was our 10th, as the workshop in 2020 was cancelled due to COVID.

Scientific content of the workshop

During the 2024 workshop, details were presented of collaborative projects and the use of NAME across many applications, organisations and countries. Interdisciplinary sessions covered the latest technical and scientific developments in NAME, inversion techniques and applications of the model to air quality, biological, radiological and volcanic dispersion.

Key topics presented at the workshop

The workshop introduced NAME v8.5, highlighting new features and giving advice for users. Attendees were also given a preview of developments planned for the next version and tips for the movement of NAME onto GitHub.

The workshop included oral and poster presentations on topics such as NAME development, communicating model output, air quality and radiological, biological and volcanic dispersion. These covered a wide range of themes including research topics to emergency response applications; different scale of dispersion from local to global scale; and a wide range of particles including pollen grains and volcanic ash.

Interactive ‘tech-bar’ sessions again provided an opportunity for attendees to get help and to ask questions on a range of NAME related issues. There were a variety of sessions, designed for both new and experienced users, including a technical help bar hosted by experienced developers, and information on the use of satellite observations in volcanic ash modelling. There were a number of opportunities for networking and informal discussions, including a workshop dinner on the Wednesday evening.

The next NAME User Workshop is due to take place in Summer 2025.