Hugh Pumphrey's home page

About me

I am a reader in the School of Geosciences, a post I took up in September 2003. 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 measurements from EOS MLS and was lead author on the first paper on this subject. I am now investigating the inter-annual variability of HCN in the tropical stratosphere.

Teaching

I am the degree programme co-ordinator of the M.Sc in Geosciences and Remote Sensing There is some information for enrolled students on this degree. For this degree, I teach a course called Inverse Theory. I also teach the Year 4 Physics course "Physics of Climate". Finally, I am teaching the lectures on radiation for the year 1/2 meteorology courses "Meteorology: Atmosphere and Environment" and "Meteorology: Weather and Climate." For the latter, I am also the course organiser.

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.
• 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.

I am the convenor of the School of GeoSciences IT committee.

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.