In honour of Ada Lovelace day, I decided to write a post today about Prof Julia Slingo, the new chief scientist at the UK Met Office. News of Julia’s appointment came out in the summer last year during my visit to the Met Office, coincidentally on the same day that I met her, at a workshop on the HiGEM project (where, incidentally, I saw some very cool simulations of ocean temperatures). Julia’s role at the meeting was to represent the sponsor (NERC – the UK equivalent of Canada’s NSERC), but what impressed me about her talk was both her detailed knowledge of the project, and the way she nurtured it – she’ll make a great chief scientist.
Julia’s research has focussed on tropical variability, particularly improving our understanding of the monsoons, but she’s also played a key role in earth system modeling, and especially in the exploration of high resolution models. But best of all, she’s just published a very readable account of the challenges in developing the next generation of climate models. Highly recommended for a good introduction to the state of the art in climate modeling.
Really interesting paper — full of cool software engineering challenges. Would you say that in terms of applied CS, climatology is behind bioinformatics?