by Luca Cantarello

Luca Cantarello is an PhD student at the University of Leeds.  He received funding from the DARE  training fund to attend Data Assimilation tutorials at the  Workshop on Sensitivity Analysis and Data Assimilation in Meteorology and Oceanography, 1-6 July 2018, Aveiro, Portugal. Here he writes about  his experience.

Since I started my PhD project at the University of Leeds as a NERC DTP student a few months ago, I have been reflecting on the importance of not feeling too alone in doing science, exactly like in the everyday life. The risk of feeling isolated while doing research can very much apply to all PhD students, but it may be particularly relevant to cases like mine, as very few people are dealing with Data Assimilation in my university.

In this sense, joining the last week’s 11th Adjoint workshop on sensitivity analysis and Data Assimilation in Meteorology and Oceanography in Aveiro has been an excellent opportunity and I am very grateful to the University of Reading and the DARE project for having helped me to take part in it, I received funding from the DARE project which enabled me to attend.

In Aveiro I could enjoy the company and the support of a vast community of scientists, all willing to share their findings and discuss problems and needs with their peers. In the room there was an impressive synergy among many researchers who had attended the same workshop several times in the past, despite it has been held only every second or third year.

 

The photograph is of the hotel where the adjoint workshop was held.

The workshop has been an important training opportunity for me as I am still in the process of learning, but also an occasion to revive my motivation with new stimuli and ideas before getting to the heart of my PhD in the coming two years.

During the poster session I took part in, I got useful feedback and comments about my project (supervised by Onno Bokhove and Steve Tobias at the University of Leeds and by Gordon Inverarity at the Met Office), in which I am trying to understand how satellite observations at different spatial scales impact on a Data Assimilation scheme. I will bring back to Leeds all the hints and the suggestions I have collected, hoping to attend the next adjoint meeting in a few years and being able to tell people the progress I have achieved in the meantime.