Bryan Lawrence

Professor of Weather and Climate Computing

I hold a three-way joint position between the National Centre for Atmospheric Science and the university departments of Meteorology and Computer Science.

See also:

• My Met Department webpage.
• My NCAS webpage.
• My Personal Website webpage.
• My Google Scholar webpage.

Research Interests

• Storage and I/O at Petascale and beyond
• Problems in Data Analysis for Atmospheric Science
• Scientific Data Description and Publication
• High Resolution and Coupled Climate Computing
• Performance of Earth System Models
• Gravity Wave and Physical Parameterisations in models

Biography

My doctorate (University of Canterbury, NZ, 1990) was in the climatology of the southern hemisphere middle atmosphere. Following completion I moved to a series of research posts at the University of Oxford, culminating in joint fellowship between the Physics Department, Lady Margeret Hall, and the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory. In 1996 I moved back to NZ to take up a lecturership in physics as the University of Canterbury, followed by a senior lectureship before returning to the UK in 2000 to become the Head of the British Atmospheric Data Centre at (what is now) the STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory. Over the next decade my role and scope grew as I established the Centre for Environmental Data Archival (CEDA) under the joint auspices of the National Centres for Atmospheric Science and Earth Observation. In 2011, that role split again, as I took up a post at the University of Reading. Soon afterwards we migrated the name of CEDA to the Centre for Environmental Data Analysis to better reflect the increasing importance of the work we were doing with the establishment of the new JASMIN super data analysis computer. In 2017 I relinquished the formal STFC part of my role to concentrate on the HPC service and the research activies necessary to support extreme scale environmental science using JASMIN and other leading HPC platforms. In keeping with my history, in 2018 I have split my university role to explicitly engage in computer science via this ACES research group in Computer Science.

The digested read: Bryan has spent a lot of time on parallel methods in atmospheric science, primarily because he is always doing multiple jobs. He remains interested in parallel data analysis and parallel simulation!

Teaching

I am not currently doing any undergraduate teaching. My last sustained period of such teaching was at the University of Canterbury where amongst other things I taught Digital Electronics, Radar Remote Sensing and Geophysical Fluid Dynamics.