An external view of the Met Office building at night.

Dr Sylvia Bohnenstengel

Sylvia works on urban boundary layer processes and their representation within the Met Office's Unified Model.

Areas of expertise

  • Boundary layer and urban meteorology

  • Numerical modelling of urban and mesoscale interaction

  • Subgrid-scale land-use and surface flux parametrizations

  • Urban air quality

Sylvia's Publications

Current activities

Sylvia works in the Mesoscale Modelling group at MetOffice@Reading based at the University of Reading, Department of Meteorology. Sylvia works on representing urban processes in high-resolution version of the Unified Model such as the UKV. The aim of this work is to understand the processes leading to higher temperatures in the urban environment and faithfully parametrize these processes in the Unified Model at different spatial scales. An important part of this work is the validation of the Unified Model against observations taken during field measurements.

Career background

Sylvia joined the Met Office on a part-time basis in October 2013 while continuing her work at the University of Reading. She moved onto a full time position with the Met Office in October 2014. Prior to this Sylvia worked as a scientist and project manager at the University of Reading for the ClearfLo project, focusing on the impact of urban meteorology on air quality, and as a scientist during the LUCID project, determining the processes that lead to the London urban heat island. Sylvia did her PhD in mesoscale modelling at the Meteorological Department at the University of Hamburg and the Max-Planck Institute for Meteorology, Hamburg, Germany.