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CSER Webinar Series: Thomas Jones, Cooperative Institute for Severe and High-Impact Weather Research and Operations (CIWRO)
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Thomas Jones Research Scientist at CIMMS/CIWRO
From 2010 to the present, Thomas has been employed as a Research Scientist at CIMMS/CIWRO as part of the Warn-on-Forecast (WoFS) project. He received his PhD at the University of Alabama in Huntsville in May 2006. His primary duty involves developing and testing methods to assimilate satellite data, with an emphasis on GOES-R products, into storm-scale numerical weather prediction models such as the Warn-on-Forecast System (WoFS).
In 2020, a new project integrating HRRR-Smoke technology in collaboration with GSL was begun to allow for short-term probabilistic forecasts of smoke generated from wildfires, resulting in WoFS-Smoke. He is also leading a fire weather “tiger team” within NSSL to coordinate fire-related research across divisions, which includes planning for future field products, fire-weather model coupling, and increased observations of the active and post-fire conditions. In addition to research efforts, he has been involved in real-time support of the WoFS as part of the HWT. He was responsible for all satellite-DA aspects of the system, which includes realtime observation processing and monitoring until 2022 before being transitioned to a cloud-based system. He led the development of synthetic satellite, convection initiation, tropical cyclones and drought related parameters for WoFS and have received positive feedback from NWS forecasters on their usefulness in real-time applications.
He currently serves as the CIWRO representative to the NWC library committee and has also served as a member of the CIWRO travel, and best paper committees. He is currently an organizer for the CIWRO fire weather workshop occurring in February 2024. Finally, he has been involved with several University of Oklahoma related activities. He was appointed as Adjunct Associate Faculty in 2019, and he has advised two OU Honors and OU Capstone projects. He served on the Master’s committee for Joel McAuliffe who graduated in May 2020, and on the Ph.D. committee of Sijie Pan. He also performed guest lectures on satellite DA for the Advanced Data Assimilation Methods class (METR-6313) and served as instructor for the Convective Seminar Series class from Fall 2019 until Spring 2020. As part of the fire weather project, he will be co-advising a student starting in 2025.