An external view of the Met Office building at night.

Dr Matt Martin

Matt leads the research and development of marine data assimilation systems in the Met Office.

Areas of expertise

  • Assimilation of data into ocean and sea-ice models.

  • Analysis of sea surface temperature and sea-ice data.

Publications by Matt Martin

Current activities

Matt manages the marine data assimilation group which is part of Ocean Forecasting Research. The main aim of the group is to improve the performance of the marine component of the Met Office's analysis and prediction systems across all time-scales by improving their assimilation of observations.

The current focus of Matt's work is to lead the development of a variational ocean data assimilation scheme within the ocean modelling framework, called NEMOVAR. This scheme is developed in collaboration with ECMWF, CERFACS, INRIA and other groups. Its development improves the assimilation of data into the ocean forecasting systems used in the Met Office in both the deep ocean and shelf-seas systems, providing more accurate estimates of the ocean state with which to initialise ocean and coupled forecasts, and with which to perform ocean reanalyses. Matt also contributes to the development of a coupled ocean-atmosphere data assimilation system which is used to initialise coupled forecasts as part of a seamless prediction system at the Met Office. 

Career background

Matt has worked on ocean data assimilation since starting at the Met Office in 2000. Prior to joining the Met Office he completed a PhD in ocean data assimilation at the Department of Mathematics in the University of Reading. In 2008 Matt became manager of the team responsible for developing the Met Office's marine data assimilation systems. Matt also led the development of the OSTIA SST and sea-ice analysis system and chaired the GHRSST Inter-Comparison Technical Advisory Group until 2012.

External recognition

Matt is a member of the OceanPredict Science Team and is the co-chair of its Data Assimilation Task Team. This involves leading the the coordination of international efforts to develop ocean and coupled data assimilation systems.