About me
As anyone could have guessed from the domain-name, yes my name is Susanna Hagelin, Dr. Susanna Hagelin. The title is still new enough that I like to put it in front of my name at every opportunity I get. However, I'm the useless kind of doctor, as a friend of mind so eloquently explained the difference between a medical doctor and a doctor of philosophy. Let me be clear on one point though, I don't consider neither myself nor my education useless. The world needs all kinds of people.
I grew up in Göteborg, on the west coast of Sweden. Since then I've always liked the sea and the cry of seagulls, unless
it's stupid o'clock in the morning. When I was little I wanted to be a paleontologist when I grew up. What could be more fun
than to discover new species and reconstruct the past and trying to understand what things were like back then, so long ago?
I regret to inform my younger self that this has not come to pass. The spirit of curiosity lead me on to a different path, the
path to answer questions like why is the sky blue? and where do clouds come from?
(Short answers: Rayleigh scattering and aerosols.)
So I went to the University of Uppsala to find the answer of both these questions, and many other things as well. Four years later I graduated with a Master of Science in Physics, with a thesis concerning the influence of cold sea water on the fluxes between the ocean and the atmosphere (here it is).
Having enjoyed life in Uppsala, it was time for the next adventure. A PhD, but why stay in Uppsala when you have the chance to do it in Florence, in Italy? So off I went for three and half years, studying the use of numerical weather forecasting for astronomers. For full details I refer the honourable web-surfer to the actual thesis, click here
Since then I continued my wanderings across Europe and for 2.5 years I did a Post-doc at Météo-France in Toulouse for DPrévi-PI and CNRM/GMAP. This was France after all, so one must use all available acronyms. I spent two years mainly worked on veryfing he ability of high-resolution version of the AROME model which is ment to one day be used as input data for a LES model to forecast the wake vortices at Paris - CDG airport. I spent the last 6 months mostly working on the verification of the precipitation forecasts from a time-lagged ensemble of the AROME NWC (AROME Nowcasting).
Then I started to work for the Met Office in Exeter, in the United Kingdom. Now I finally had a permanent position, working in research and development. I stayed there for four and a bit years. My job in the beginning was to investigate the use of the new dynamic core in the UK ensemble forecasting system, MOGREPS-UK. Another tasks is how to improve the forecasts from MOGREPS-UK to better use the capacity of the new shiny HPC. More members, higher resolution, or a larger domain? For an answer, see here. Then we investigated the idea of a time-lagged ensemble, but I left before this system was fully implemented operationally.
Now, I'm back in Sweden and my tour of European meteorological services continues. Now I work in data assimilation again and mostly look at satellite data and how they can best be used by the Harmonie-Arome system. At the time of writing, I look at the ways we can best use the data from the Aeolus wind profiler satellite.