Hugh Pumphrey's home page

About me

I am a reader in the School of Geosciences, a post I took up a few years ago. Just in case you are trying to put a face to the name I look more or less like the picture. If you need to contact me, go to my official contact details page.

Research interests

My main interest is the remote sounding of the stratosphere and mesosphere by microwave limb sounding. I am part of a large team based at NASA's Jet Propulsion laboratory, which builds and operates microwave limb sounding instruments. You can read more about this at the MLS web site. To date, we have built two of these instruments: UARS MLS which was launched in September 1991 and EOS MLS which was finally launched on 15 July 2004. I am responsible for the HCN and CO measurements from EOS MLS and was lead author on the first papers on the HCN data. I am now investigating the inter-annual variability of HCN in the tropical stratosphere. There is more information on my research on my Zope-free page.

Teaching

Most of my teaching is on undergraduate courses in meteorology and M.Sc courses in remote sensing, especially its inverse theory aspects. As a result of this I have also ended up teaching signal analysis and inverse theory for M.Sc geophysicists and have taken on the role of degree programme co-ordinator for the undergraduate geophysics degrees.

Current weather

Local Mirror

I have collected some current weather images from a variety of sources. This is for the convenience of local users, so I'm not publishing them outwith the University.

METAR plots

• A plot of recent data from EGPH, the Edinburgh airport weather station.
• A map and animation of current METAR temperature and pressure over Europe.
• A record of METAR data from Edinburgh at the times of the Met:W+C labs.

Links to other sources of current weather data

• On the School web site
• • The webcam page
  • The weather station page
• Elsewhere
• • The Met Office
  • The US Airforce Operational Weather Squadron provide a wide variety of analysis and forecast charts. Look under UKMO Model U/A progs for upper air charts, but be warned that some of the charts are stuck at a date in the past.
  • The Free University of Berlin provide charts with names for every cyclone, including the latest analysis and the latest forecast.
  • Montreal-based metocentre.com provide a variety of charts, including combined 500 hPa / MSLP charts. You'll want to look in their Europe section for these.
  • www.wetter3.de provide animations of a wide range of charts.
  • Surface Radiation budget data
  • NERC satellite station for polar-orbiting satellite pictures
  • EUMETSAT for geostationary satellite pictures
  • Radiosonde soundings from University of Wyoming

Computing

I am something of a Linux zealot (but I try not to be too annoying about it.) I favour the Debian distribution. Here are some more details on my Linux interests.

My professional programming is mostly in Fortran and various scientific graphics languages. I have written a useful perl program called fmkmf to make it easier to use make with Fortran 90/95 programs.

Other stuff

Although the school web site is beautiful-looking, it is tiresome to use for some sorts of dynamic content. For that reason, I have some material on the secret, zope-free, corporate-image-free web server.