Met Office Academic Partnership Seminar with Professor Stefán Smith
The Met Office Academic Partnership (MOAP) hosted a talk by Stefán Smith, Professor of Energy Systems and the Built Environment at the University of Reading.
Professor Smith’s research explores themes around energy system dynamics and energy demand, which compliments existing collaborative efforts here at the University of Birmingham MOAP (Energy-themed-discovery-day). The hybrid event was held at the Elm House hub with attendees from across the university, the Met Office and wider Met Office Academic Partnership.
During the seminar, entitled ‘modelling dynamic anthropogenic activity in urban contexts for energy demand and environmental assessment’, Professor Smith introduced the DAVE modelling system: DAVE (Dynamic Anthropogenic actiVities and feedback to Emissions).
Professor Smith described how DAVE emerged from a ‘desire to understand how the connections between social and physical processes in urban contexts matter to both energy demand and local environmental conditions’. The model incorporates multiple scales (from individual people through to physical processes at the neighbourhood scale) and data sets that combine to inform model structure as well as the harmonisation of model input data. London was used by the team as a development case study city, but the system is designed to be transferable to cities world-wide. It is currently being setup for use in multiple cities - including Berlin, Geneva, Lausanne and Bristol.
Professor Smith then went on to highlight some of the different modelling studies proposed using DAVE and how these studies could inform governance and operational activity for energy and weather forecasting organisations.
This MOAP lunchtime seminar gave participants an excellent opportunity for networking and sparked a lot of interested discussion, ending with a lively Q&A.