Matt Fry

• Hydrological data management and exploitation
• AI/ML in environmental sciences, and Environmental Digital Twins
• Digital Research Infrastructures  
• Web-based dissemination of environmental data
• Time series data standards
• Software for environmental science
• Hydrological data rescue

I lead a group of scientists, data managers, analysts and software developers mostly working on projects to deliver our science and data to end users.

We produce, analyse and manage datasets within UKCEH's water science, and develop applications to get data out to end users, who can be researchers, consultants, regulators or the general public.

I work on the delivery of the UK Flood and Drought Research Infrastructure, leading activities to produce a digital research infrastructure for floods and drought that will provide a step-change in how the UK research community (and beyond) access, integrate, and analyse new and existing sources of hydrological data. 

I am a Senior Research Fellow with the Alan Turing Institute, developing projects and collaborations to increase capabilities to exploit AI and data science to address environmental problems, particularly in the area of terrestrial and freshwater sciences, and leading a project on AI and autonomous systems for biodiversity monitoring.

I am involved in a number of Environmental Digital Twin initiatives, including the development of an Information Management Framework for Environmental Digital Twins and leading the Land InSight digital twin project.

I have an interest freshwater citizen science and how data can be standardised, integrated and analysed for improving understanding and management of freshwater ecosystems. I lead the Data Platforms Working Group of the CastCo project.

I work on UKCEH's Hydro-JULES project, setting out how we can make hydrological data and models more accessible to the wider research community, including through the use of DataLabs as a collaborative web-enable platform for use of the JASMIN facility.

I am an active member of the NERC Digital Environment Expert Network. I was PI of the ENTRAIN project within the NERC Constructing a Digital Environment Programme looking at bringing together sensor networks; developing standards-based data structures and linking environmental monitoring sites to the river network; assessing new ways to capture sensor data in the field and transmit this to data storage; and developing machine learning algorithms for quality control and infilling of sensor data.

I am leading the Hydrology project of the Copernicus in situ component; identifying requirements for in situ hydrological monitoring data (river and lake levels, river flows, river and lake water quality, soil moisture) for the Copernicus services, and coordinating actions to improve their access to this data.

I lead IT systems development for the National River Flow Archive at Wallingford, where we are developing and applying tools for managing and using river gauging station data. This includes time series data (such as flow and rainfall), gauging station metadata (on things like station history and measurement quality) and spatial datasets (catchment boundaries, gridded rainfall, etc.). We have live data streams, an API, and a related R package.

I am co-chair of the Global Water Information Interest Group of the Research Data Alliance. I am a member of the Open Geospatial Consortium's Hydrology Domain Working Group, who are developing standards for water data transfer, including WaterML2.

I lead the systems for the COSMOS-UK project, streaming, processing and quality-controlling real-time data from telemetry and making it accessible via web-services.

I managed the data element of a knowledge exchange project for the UK Drought and Water Scarcity Programme, through which we delivered a large number of new drought datasets, infrastructure to enable programmatic access to this data, and web applications to make data access simple (including the UK Water Resources Portal, Drought Data Hub, and more).

I managed the development of UKCEH's Environmental Information Platform, and related initiatives attempting to integrate data and modelling and produce web-portals for disseminating UKCEH science and data. This includes our Droughts and Lakes Portals.

I have written guidance on data management for the World Meteorological Organisation, including the Guidelines for Hydrological Data Rescue and Guide to Hydrological Practices.

In my time at UKCEH I have helped produce the LowFlows software for the Environment Agency and SEPA, and software for implementing the Flood Estimation Handbook rainfall-runoff method, and helped commercialise these through Wallingford Hydrosolutions with whom I spent 5 years on part-time secondment as software manager. I managed the HYDATA software used as the national hydrometric archive in many developing countries and have extensive experience working in Africa. I have also produced drought analysis software and GIS-based water resources management software for the southern Africa region and have run numerous training workshops through projects such as FRIEND.