Martin Willett

Areas of expertise

• Diagnostic development
• Evaluation of NWP models
• Parametrization of convection

Publications by Martin Willett

Current activities

Martin is a senior scientist working on the evaluation and development of the Global Atmosphere version of the Unified Model in its Met Office Numerical Weather Prediction models and Met Office seasonal and climate models configurations. A significant focus of his work in the development of the parametrization of convection in the Unified Model and to that end he works very closely with scientists in the Atmospheric Processes and Parametrizations area. He is currently testing several new developments to the parametrization of convection.

Martin develops and maintains a diagnostic system to monitor the performance of the Met Office Numerical Weather Prediction models configuration of the Unified Model. Martin and others use the system to identify, monitor and investigate systematic model errors. The system includes visual comparisons of forecast fields with the model's own analysis, GLDAS and TRMM products, and global model data from other centres. The system also includes visualisations of the tendencies from the physics parametrizations and the dynamics. Martin is currently expanding the system to look at extra-tropical features (e.g. blocking) and tropical features (e.g. the MJOand the South Asian Monsoon) in the Met Office Numerical Weather Prediction models configuration of the Unified Model.

Career background

Since he joined the Met Office in 2002, Martin has been a member of the Global Model Development and Diagnostics (GMDD) group where he has worked on the development of the Met Office Numerical Weather Prediction models configuration of the Unified Model. He has focused on the model's parametrization of moist convection and has developed a number of improvements to the scheme to improve its representation of physical processes, computational efficiency and numerical robustness. Martin has recently worked on a upgrades to the vertical and horizontal resolution of the Met Office Numerical Weather Prediction models configuration of the Unified Model. Martin has been involved several GCSS activities. He has led a component of a case study, which was part of wider case study that also included cloud-resolving models and single column models, that compared simulations of active and suppressed convection in the tropical west pacific from three global atmospheric models including the Unified Model.

Prior to joining the Met Office, Martin was a research scientist at TRL Ltd where he worked mainly on the development of techniques and software for the assessment of road surfaces and structures. Martin received an MSc in the Mathematical Modelling of the Environment at the University of East Anglia and he did his undergraduate degree in Physics at Durham University.