Dr George Pankiewicz
George leads the management of collaboration with the Unified Model
Areas of expertise
- Operational NWP
- Unified Model R&D programme
- Collaboration performance
- Satellite imagery applications
Current activities
George manages the Unified Model partnership team. The team facilitates the UM partnership through community and relationship management, planning of science and technology, technical infrastructure development, model support and training activities.
Core and associate Partners use the UM for operational weather forecasts and climate modelling and are based in the UK, Australia, India, Korea, New Zealand, South Africa, Poland, the United States and the Philippines. Partners contribute to a number of scientific and technical programmes, and activities include:
- Evaluating regional atmosphere models around the world
- Understanding and improving the representation of convection
- Evaluating the global couple model for NWP and climate applications
- Building the model’s technical infrastructure, e.g. verification, observation processing and ancillaries
- Running joint seasonal forecasting systems
George is responsible for overseeing the delivery of these programmes and reporting to the UM partner board, as well managing other partnership activities such as science workshops, model support and training.
Career background
George has spent much of his career at the Met Office involved in Numerical Weather Prediction, initially focusing on applications of meteorological satellite data, then moving to the International team working with the ECMWF and National Meteorological Services. The concept of the operational use of the Unified Model was developed in the mid 2000s, and George took on the role of UM collaboration manager in 2006. The role has developed into one of managing a partnership where around 10 organisations contribute to the development of world leading seamless modelling system in a coordinated way.
Before joining the Met Office, George completed his PhD on numerical modelling of cometary dust at the University of Kent. Whilst at Leicester University, George's appetite for collaboration developed when he spent 3 years as a visiting scientist at the Max-Planck Institute for Physics, in Munich, managing Wide Field Camera operations on the ROSAT orbiting X-ray astronomical observatory and undertaking research on planetary atmospheres.
External Recognition
- Chair of the Natural Hazard Research Platform Technical Advisory Group - a multi-party research platform funded by New Zealand government and dedicated to increasing New Zealand's resilience to Natural Hazards through high quality collaborative research
- An invited author for the Taylor & Francis book Neural Networks for Hydrological Modelling
- Fellow of the Royal Meteorological Society (FRMetS)
- Awarded a NASA group achievement award for his work on the ROSAT orbiting X-ray astronomical observatory in 1991