Prof Craig Bishop

Bio

Prof Bishop’s ensemble-based data assimilation and ensemble-forecasting techniques are now used by leading environmental forecasting agencies such as the European Center for Medium Range Weather Forecasting, the UK Met Office, the German weather service, the Swiss weather service, the US National Weather Service, the US Navy and the Japanese, Korean and Brazilian Meteorological agencies. After completing his PhD at Monash University, he was a post-doc at the University of Reading where he was awarded the Royal Meteorological Society’s L.F. Richardson prize for his PhD work on the dynamics of baroclinic waves in deformation fields. He then worked as a visiting scientist at the NASA Goddard space flight center where he received the Universities Space Research Association, 1994 Excellence in Scientific Research Award. This was followed by an appointment to the faculty of the Pennsylvania State University’s prestigious Department of Meteorology – then the largest atmospheric science department in the United States. There he was granted early tenure and promotion. However, to obtain a better understanding of the operational weather prediction problem, he left Penn State for the Marine Meteorology Division of the Naval Research Laboratory in Monterey, California. There he was awarded 6 outstanding contribution awards, 3 NRL Alan Berman publication awards, and one NRL Edison patent award. He returned to Australia as Professor of Weather Prediction at the University of Melbourne in June 2018. His current research mainly focusses on the data assimilation science of using models, observations and advanced estimation theory to initialize ensemble forecasts and to identify and account for systematic and stochastic aspects of model error in ensemble forecasting.