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 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.