Welcome lunch for Drs. Guo-Yuan Lien and Juan Ruiz

On Friday, July 11, 2014, we had a warm welcoming party for Drs. Guo-Yuan Lien (back row, fourth from left) and Juan Ruiz (front row, left most) over lunch in Kachoen. Our lab has been growing consistently by now, with eight full-time scientists and technical staff and three supporting staff in addition to five visiting scientists. Dr. Lien recently graduated from the University of Maryland, and his main focus was precipitation data assimilation in global numerical weather prediction. He will work on Big Data Assimilation (BDA) with the next-generation LES (large-eddy simulation) weather model SCALE. As for Dr. Ruiz, this is his third visit to Japan, and this time, he will stay for three months. He will also work on the BDA project with particular foci on the quality control of the Osaka/Kobe Phased Array Weather Radar and on parameter estimation methods in BDA applications.

Professor Norihiko Sugimoto visited RIKEN/AICS

On March 25, 2014, Professor Norihiko Sugimoto from Keio University visited my lab in Kobe. Professor Sugimoto is my long-time friend from College, since we were in the same program in the physics department at Kyoto University. Professor Sugimoto visited us just before his departure for Paris to spend two years in Ecole Polytechnique. We had a lot of discussions about research and other things. We also enjoyed observing the K computer. Wish him a fruitful stay in Paris and the very best of his success!

Professor Brian Hunt visited Kobe

On March 18, 2014, Professor Brian Hunt of the University of Maryland visited my lab in Kobe. The group photo with the K computer includes Professor Hunt (third from left), me (fourth from right) and lab members. Professor Hunt is well known for the Local Ensemble Transform Kalman Filter (Hunt et al. 2007, Physica D) developed at the University of Maryland, Weather-Chaos group. Professor Hunt is a math professor and one of the founding members of the interdisciplinary Weather-Chaos group. We had very fruitful discussions of our recent progress on data assimilation research. After our meeting in the afternoon, Professor Hunt and I headed to Kyoto to attend a workshop on Math-Meteorology collaboration and Big Data Assimilation in Meteorology. This workshop was also the second RIKEN-Kyoto University joint workshop on data assimilation, and I will describe it sometime soon.

Farewell lunch for Dr. Juan Ruiz

On March 6, 2014, we had a joyful farewell lunch at Kachoen for Dr. Juan Ruiz with a lot of smiles! Juan's second visit to our lab for a month this time has been very successful as always. He has been making amazing progress on the quality control and observation operator for Phased Array Weather Radar and Doppler Lidar observations. I am hoping that we will be ready sometime soon to publicize these wonderful achievements.

Lab members in January 2014

This picture includes our new members, Drs. Steve Penny and Shunji Kotsuki. Dr. Penny is visiting from the University of Maryland for a month, generously supported by a very competitive JSPS fellowship program. He is studying particle filtering methods suitable for high-dimensional spatio-temporal chaos. Dr. Kotsuki just started in January as a full-time team member. He studies data assimilation for hydrological cycle.

Lab members in December 2013

We have more rapid changes in my lab than the quarterly updates. Africa Perianez (fourth from left) of German Weather Service (DWD) is visiting from Thursday, December 5 to Friday 13, 2013. We started collaborations on theoretical developments of localization methods and other topics in ensemble data assimilation. Also, Ms. Yukie Komori (second from right) is our new assistant. This picture includes everyone in the lab except for some Visiting Researchers, Drs. Juan Ruiz, Shu-Chih Yang, and Masahiro Sawada.

Two new members

We have two new members starting on August 1, 2013. Professor Shu-Chih Yang (right) is a professor in Taiwanese National Central University and is visiting my lab until mid September as a Visiting Scientist. Dr. Koji Terasaki (left) joined my lab as a Postdoctoral Researcher.

Thank you, wonderful visitors!

On Monday, February 25, the day before the Data Assimilation Workshop, four visitors visited my lab. Professor Eugenia Kalnay (third from left) is my former adviser and came a long way from the East Coast of the US. Professor Shu-Chih Yang (third from right) is my former classmate and one of my best friends, coming from Taiwan. Dr. Ji-Sun Kang (second from right) was a colleague until last December in Maryland but moved to Korea recently. Guo-Yuan Lien (left) is a student in Maryland. We enjoyed seeing each other and had fruitful scientific discussions. All four visitors attended the Data Assimilation Workshop, and Eugenia and Guo-Yuan attended the AICS symposium on Thursday and Friday, and spent the whole week. I am very grateful to the four wonderful visitors and hope they enjoyed their stay in Kobe.

Thank you, wonderful summer visitors!

It is very fortunate to have these wonderful and very capable visitors in my lab this summer. Keiichi Kondo (left), a Ph.D. student in Tsukuba University, arrived on June 27 and has been working on a theoretical aspect of ensemble-based data assimilation. Dr. Juan Ruiz (2nd from left), a researcher at University of Buenos Aires, has been working on model parameter estimation in a case of tropical cyclone and is finishing his one-month stay. Tetsuro Miyachi (3rd from left), an M.S. student in Kyoto University, is visiting for a month for working with the NCEP operational global forecasting system (GFS). Prof. Shu-Chih Yang (2nd from right) is an alumna of our department, graduated in the same year as me, and kindly decided to spend about a month this summer in College Park. This picture also includes Prof. Eugenia Kalnay (3rd from right) and myself (right).

Dr. Nobumasa Komori (JAMSTEC) visited UMD

On Monday, May 14, Dr. Nobumasa Komori from the Earth Simulator Center, JAMSTEC (Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology) visited College Park and gave a talk at our regular Weather-Chaos meeting on the Coupled Atmosphere-Ocean General Circulation Model (CGCM) for the Earth Simulator, so-called "CFES". The Earth Simulator is a Japanese flagship supercomputer system located in Yokohama. Dr. Komori was visiting our area for attending a conference in Silver Spring in the previous week. Dr. Komori was a colleague of Professor Enomoto, who visited UMD in March, and is also my collaborator since 2005. We are currently collaborating very closely to apply the Local Ensemble Transform Kalman Filter (LETKF) to the CFES. Since Dr. Komori has been working on the modeling effort of CFES, he talked about CFES simulations and the reduced-resolution version known as "CFES-mini", that we use for CFES-LETKF. It was quite intriguing to hear about the cutting-edge simulation studies on the coupled atmosphere-ocean system at a relatively high resolution.

Professor Takeshi Enomoto (Kyoto U) visited UMD and NCEP

On Monday, March 12, Professor Takeshi Enomoto from the Kyoto University visited College Park and gave a talk about the OREDA project (Observing System Research and Ensemble Data Assimilation Development Research) at our regular Weather-Chaos meeting. Professor Enomoto is my long-time collaborator since 2005 when we started applying the Local Ensemble Transform Kalman Filter (LETKF) to the Earth Simulator Global Model known as AFES (Atmospheric General Circulation Model for the Earth Simulator). He presented the revised version of AFES-LETKF Experimental Reanalysis (ALERA2) and showed the most recent results of global coupled ocean-atmosphere data assimilation using the LETKF.

On Tuesday, March 13, Professor Enomoto visited the NCEP in Camp Springs, and gave another talk about a completely different topic on his work on dynamical core developments. He talked about approaches to reduce numerical errors without much increase of computational time. The wide range of topics that he covered really impressed me.

On Wednesday, March 14, Professor Enomoto spent a whole day in College Park again, mainly meeting with our postdocs and students to discuss about research ideas. His 3-day visit to Maryland was very fruitful and constructive to us, and hopefully to him, too. I feel very lucky to have this close and long-time collaboration with him.

Dr. Kosuke Ito (National Taiwan U) visited NCEP and UMD

On Monday, February 27, Dr. Kosuke Ito from the National Taiwan University visited UMD and presented his work on Tropical Cyclones at our regular Weather-Chaos meeting. He also visited NCEP and gave the EMC seminar on February 28.

His research focused on including surface exchange coefficients Cd/Ck in the control variables of 4-dimensional variational data assimilation. In this way, he could estimate these crucial model parameters for Tropical Cyclone evolution, and improved Tropical Cyclone analyses both in an idealized experiment and in a real Typhoon case. Estimating key model parameters is one of the frontier research topics, and it was very interesting to see his pioneering work.

Professor Watanabe and Dr. Chikamoto (U of Tokyo) visited NCEP and UMD

On Wednesday, November 16, Professor Watanabe and Dr. Chikamoto of the Atmospheric and Oceanic Research Institute (AORI), University of Tokyo visited the NCEP and UMD.

They gave a seminar at NCEP in the morning on their work on decadal climate prediction using their own global air-sea coupled earth system model MIROC. Professor Watanabe provided an overview of the latest development of MIROC version 5, showing much improvement mainly due to the newly developed physics packages. Dr. Chikamoto talked about decadal ensemble prediction using MIROC, particularly with a new idea of "Anomaly Assimilation" in which the systematic differences between model climatology and observation data are considered to deal with the initial drift problem.

After enjoying conversation over lunch with NCEP folks, they visited my office in College Park and had a very nice Japanese conversation (picture).