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.