This might be of interest to the more application-driven members of the group. Protip: an abridged version of this talk used these slides<http://www.jodrellbank.manchester.ac.uk/meetings/nam2012/archive/MST3/Jackson.pdf>(from 2012) ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Williams, Sian R <sian.williams07@imperial.ac.uk> Date: 22 April 2014 11:31 Subject: [atmos-seminars] Atmos seminar - David Jackson, Met Office - 29 April 11.30 Huxley 711C To: spat <spat@imperial.ac.uk>, atmos-seminars < atmos-seminars@imperial.ac.uk> Hi everyone, David Jackson from the Met Office will be giving the Atmospheric Physics seminar next Tuesday, which might be interesting for ‘space’ people too. As usual it will take place at 11.30am in Huxley 711C. The title of his talk is "The Met Office Unified Model and its extension to the thermosphere”. The abstract is below. If anyone would like to meet with David after his talk please let me know in the next few days. He is happy to discuss the Met Office’s space weather activities more informally in the afternoon if this is interesting to anyone. Best wishes, Sian *The Met Office Unified Model and its extension to the thermosphere* The Met Office Unified Model (UM) is a troposphere / stratosphere / mesosphere model which is used widely for both weather forecasting and climate studies. It includes a comprehensive representation of atmospheric dynamics, physics and chemistry, and currently has an upper boundary near 85 km. In order to develop an improved capability for space weather forecasts, it is desirable to develop a coupled system of models representing the domain from the Sun to the Earth's surface. Much space weather forecast research is focused on the thermosphere and ionosphere, since that is where many space weather impacts are seen. While the thermosphere and ionosphere are largely driven from above, recent research has shown that the coupling between this region and the lower atmosphere is also important. For example, non-migrating tides forced in the tropical troposphere have been linked to variations in the ionospheric F region. Therefore, representation of such coupling is important. An attractive way of doing this is by building a "whole atmosphere" model, which spans the neutral atmosphere from the Earth's surface to the exobase (around 600 km) and represents the coupling between different atmospheric levels in a self-consistent manner. In this presentation, the dynamical, physical and chemical developments required to make this extended model a reality are discussed, and some initial results are presented.