Dr. Elizabeth Cooper

Elizabeth Cooper is a hydrological and land surface modeller, primarily working with the JULES land surface model, which can be used either as a standalone model of the terrestrial system or coupled to a model of the atmosphere for weather forecasting or climate applications. Elizabeth is particularly interested in approaches for driving model improvements using data assimilation methods. In such approaches, outputs from large numerical models such as JULES are combined with real world observations of, e.g., soil moisture or river flow in order to give the best estimate of the current and future state of a physical system.

Elizabeth has worked on various aspects of the NERC's Hydro-JULES project. These include improving soil moisture outputs in JULES using data assimilation, helping to implementing groundwater code in JULES on the GB mainland, and investigating the use of hydrological response units in JULES instead of grid cells. Elizabeth has also worked on using JULES and COSMOS-UK data to investigate future drought frequency under a changing climate. Elizabeth is co-lead for the hydroJULES Land Surface Data Assimilation Community of Practice (LSDA-CoP).