An external view of the Met Office building at night.

Dr Yongming Tang

Areas of expertise

  • Sea ice-ocean interaction
  • High resolution coupled forecasting NWP models
  • The dynamics and modelling of fog, sea fog and sea breezes
  • Storm surge, wind wave, tide and other coastal ocean and estuarine dynamics.

Current activities

Yongming works on the UK Earth System Model as configuration manager for the high resolution model UKESM-HI. She is responsible for incorporating scientific and technical changes into the model development path, and evaluating the impact of these changes.  She manages the system, tracking changes, working with experts in each component model, and ensuring that effective use is made of the system. She maintains the model at the latest code release for each component and influences component model development to improve aspects of performance important for UKESM.

Career background

Yongming joined the Met Office in 2002, initially in the Hadley Centre, working on the development and implementation of an ocean bottom boundary layer module. Since 2003, Yongming took on the task of developing the Met Office variable resolution UKV model., and modified the whole of the UM dynamical core routines. With its improved computational efficiency, the variable resolution UM forms the foundation for the new generation of Met Office high resolution NWP forecasting model. Together with Terry Davies and Junichi Ishida (a visiting scientist from JMA Japan), Yongming received the Met Office Chief Executive Award for excellence in Outstanding Scientific or Technical achievement category for this work.  During this period at JCMM, Yongming also developed a very high resolution and very efficient fog prediction model, and studied the impact of coastal ocean SST on the prediction of sea fog and sea breezes.
In 2011 Yongming took a secondment from the Met Office and worked at the Predictability Division of ECMWF where she worked on the development of the coupled sea ice-ocean model LIM2-NEMO with a focus on seasonal to decadal variability, and trends under climate change. While there Yongming also began working on coupling ice dynamics with an ocean wave model to study the interaction between ocean waves and sea ice. Prior to joining the Met Office, Yongming worked at Loughborough University and the Australia Bureau of Meteorology. Yongming's research interest and expertise extend to the numerical modelling of coastal oceans and estuaries, especially emphasizing storm surges, tides and ocean waves. She also studied pollutant dispersion in estuaries. Yongming was awarded a PhD in Applied Mathematics from Monash University, Australia in 1994.  

Email:  [email protected]