Professional summary

Matt is a numerical modeller, 'data-wrangler' and Research Software Engineer at UKCEH. His interests encompass the physics of the natural world, messing around with new technologies/software for data wrangling and modelling, and developing cool products/tools. He has an undergraduate Masters degree in Meteorology from the University of Reading and an MPhil from the University of Oxford.

Matt joined UKCEH in Dec 2019 as part of the Hydrological Processes and Extremes group, and worked on various projects in the area of hydro and crop modelling, data assimilation and data-wrangling. He has also developed an interest in data science, research software engineering and investigating new tools/techniques and services in this area, such as object storage, parallel & HP computing, machine learning and datalabs/jupyter notebooks. He is a keen programmer, weather-watcher and occasional storm-chaser, photographer and bookworm.

Web tools and apps

  • Matt is currently developing a nutrients/water-quality model that is designed to work with any hydrological model using the UNIFHY modelling framework. This is part of the Hydro-JULES project.
  • For the OpenCLIM project Matt developed a crop suitability model to assess how the changing climate will affect our ability to grow certain crops within the UK.
  • Matt co-developed a guide for users new to object storage, on how to optimally convert N-dimensional data and how to access this data in existing scripts and notebooks. For more information on object storage and why it is important for future science, see this talk we gave at the JASMIN User Conference 2023.
  • For the Future Flows project with Malaysia Matt developed and delivered a python training course for overseas students. After delivering he adapted it to be an on-demand course.
  • Developed a decision support tool called TAMSAT-ALERT for countries in Africa using the land surface memory as a basis for drought prediction. It is still actively used and developed by the team he worked with.
  • He co-developed 'Hot Moths', a dating app for moths, with Simon Rolph (UKCEH) to raise awareness of the diversity of moth species and how many are endangered in the UK, as part of a hackathon.

For more, see Matt's personal website.

Selected publications

Brown Matthew et al. , Potential evapotranspiration derived from HadUK-Grid 1km gridded climate observations 1969-2022 (Hydro-PE HadUK-Grid).

Rameshwaran P. et al. , Historical (1971-2005) and projected (2006-2099) hydrological model (HMF-Malaysia) estimates of monthly mean and annual maximum river flows across Peninsular Malaysia driven by CORDEX-SEA projected climate data.

Other Publications

Gray, L.J., Brown, M.J., Knight, J. et al. Forecasting extreme stratospheric polar vortex events. Nat Commun 11, 4630 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-18299-7

 

Gray, L.J., Lu, H., Brown, M.J., Knight, J.R. and Andrews, M.B. (2022), Mechanisms of influence of the Semi-Annual Oscillation on stratospheric sudden warmings. Q J R Meteorol Soc, 148: 1223-1241. https://doi.org/10.1002/qj.4256

 

Brown, M.J., Black, E., Asfaw, D. and Otu-Larbi, F. (2017), Monitoring drought in Ghana using TAMSAT-ALERT: a new decision support system. Weather, 72: 201-205. https://doi.org/10.1002/wea.3033

 

Asfaw, D., Black, E., Brown, M.J., Nicklin, K. J., Otu-Larbi, F., Pinnington, E., Challinor, A., Maidment, R. and Quaife, T. (2018). TAMSAT-ALERT v1: a new framework for agricultural decision support, Geosci. Model Dev., 11: 2353-2371. https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-11-2353-2018