• BSc Geography (University of Sheffield, 1998)
• PhD Geography (University of Birmingham, 2002)
• PG Cert in Learning & Teaching (University of Birmingham, 2009)

Professor Lee Chapman completed his PhD entitled "A Blueprint for 21st Century Road Ice Prediction" here in Birmingham. The aim of the project was to assimilate new technologies to develop the next generation of road weather prediction models (Route Based Forecasting). The main application was to accurately forecast road surface temperatures enabling optimal salt usage by local councils. The project involved the development of GIS models which utilised new survey techniques based upon GPS measurements and digital image processing.

A university spin-out company called Entice Technology Ltd was set up using funding received from the NERC SBRI scheme (£125k) to fund further technological development, protection of intellectual property by the filing of patents and commercialisation of the work carried out for the PhD. The business was sold in 2006 to Weather Services International Ltd. Professor Chapman is still actively involved in research and business engagement with respect to winter road maintenance. He is presently the President of the Standing International Road Weather Commission (SIRWEC).

In 2010, after holding a Roberts Research Fellowship for 5 years, Lee Chapman was promoted to a Senior Lectureship in Applied Meteorology and Climatology and in 2013 became Reader in Climate Resilience.  He was awarded the 2013 RGS Cuthbert Peek award for advancing knowledge of urban climatology through GIS and remote sensing, the 2014 IBM Innovation Award for ‘making meterological measurements that matter’ presented by the RMetS. He became Professor of Climate Resilience in 2016.

Professor Lee Chapman is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and has a significant teaching profile which spans several modules and programmes of study in the following areas:

• Tutorials, IT Skills and fieldwork
• Geomatics for geographers
• Foundation maths
• Atmospheric observations
• Dissertation support

The teaching methods and assessment strategies used on these modules were informed by studying for a PGCert in Learning and Teaching which Professor Chapman completed in 2009. He was nominated for a prize in Level 1 of the course and won a prize for Level 2 where he had his teaching project published:

Chapman, L. (2010) Dealing with maths anxiety: How do you teach mathematics in a geography department? Journal of Geography in Higher Education 34:205-213.

Professor Chapman currently supervises ten postgraduate students:

• Jennifer Kirby: High resolution imagery for trackside leaf-fall monitoring (EPSRC iCASE with Railway Safety & Standards Board)
• Helen Roberts: Using social media to investigate urban green space function (funded by EPSRC)
• Simon Hodgkinson: Railway interdependencies (funded by EPSRC)
• Paul Fisher: High resolution climate and health relationships (funded by Public Health England)
• Juliana Antunes De Azevedo: Impact of urban heat on current and future energy demand (funded by CNPq Brazil)
• Tatiana Prieto-Lopez: Impact of urban heat islands on the life expectancy of distribution transformers (partly funded by E-ON)
• Richard Bassett: Quantifying the influence of wind advection on urban heat islands for an improvement of a climate change adaption tool (funded by NERC with Birmingham City Council as a CASE partner) 
• Daniel Murrant: Quantifying the impact of future water energy nexus constraints on the UK non-nuclear thermoelectric power station fleet both in terms of cost and technology (funded by the Midlands Energy Consortium with Energy Technologies Institute as a CASE partner)
• Duy Phan Nhut: Planning resilient transport systems in relation to flooding and other hazards (funded by Vietnamese International Education Development)
• Thomas Bennett: Road temperature modelling and dynamic gritter routing. (based at Aston University with supervisors Dan Cornford and Lucy Bastin, funded by EPSRC with Amey as CASE partner) 

Potential students should contact Professor Chapman directly.

Research groups

• Environmental health sciences
• Climate and atmosphere

Current Projects:

Altasense: Demonstrating the potential of the Internet of Things (IoT) for Iow cost infrastructure monitoring (PI: Funded by EPSRC Impact Acceleration).

IoT literally means ‘things’ (e.g. sensors and other smart devices) which are connected to the internet. This may seem insignificant, but ‘things’ represent a new, and increasingly, critical infrastructure requiring a dedicated technological ecosystem. Indeed, since 2008, the number of ‘things’ has outnumbered users online.  A range of industry co-created projects are presently underway to develop low cost condition monitoring solutions based on the IoT with the aim of mitigating against day to day meteorological hazards on infrastructure networks.  Altasense provides the commercial vehicle to operationalise these solutions.

Wintersense: Demonstrating the Potential of the Internet of Things in Winter Road Maintenance (PI: Funded by EPSRC: £208k)

The wintersense project was co-created with Amey (who manage the Private Finance Initiative contract for Birmingham City Council) and will see a deployment of a new generation of low cost, internet enabled, road surface temperature sensors embedded within an IoT ecosystem. For the first time, this approach will provide a high resolution monitoring and verification solution for route based forecasts commonly used by decision makers to determine where and when to salt the roads in winter.  It is hoped that this project will further reinforce user-confidence in such forecasts, in turn enabling increasingly cost effective ‘smart gritting’ operations in the sector.

Autumnsense: Solving the Adhesion Riddle (PI: Funded by EPSRC and the Railway Safety and Standards Board: £104k)

This project is conducting a feasibility study into how high resolution sensor networks and hemispherical imagery could potentially be used to reduce the perennial problem of leaves on the line.  Poor traction and braking from leaf fall in the autumn currently cause severe problems to the railway system. However, these issues are not confined to autumn alone as the condensation of water droplets on rail heads during warmer months, as well as other contaminants can also alter the interface between the wheel and the rail and cause poor braking.  The project will explore the potential of an IoT based methodology to measure moisture on our railways at an unprecedented scale.  A studentship is also looking at innovative means to monitor and quantify leaf fall during Autumn for inclusion in models currently run by project partners, the Met Office.

Summersense: Dynamic heat risk management to reduce the costs of propagating hot weather delays on the railway network. (PI: Funded by NERC: £125k)

Summersense investigates the feasibility of implementing dynamic heat risk management on the railway network to reduce the costs of propagating hot weather delays   In order to manage the heat risk, blanket speed restrictions are often imposed above pre-defined temperature thresholds to ensure safety, but causing delays for passengers. This project focuses on determining the feasibility of implementing dynamic thresholds for blanket speed restrictions which increment over the course of the summer season. The rationale for this is that failures are 'harvested' during hot spells and hence the first heatwave of the year highlights network vulnerability, with subsequent heatwaves (unless significantly hotter) being less problematic.

HiTemp (PI: Funded by NERC Networks of Sensors: £610k)

Birmingham is the UK's second most populous city, with a population in excess of 1 million people and a well defined Urban Heat Island (UHI). The UHI is a direct consequence of anthropogenic influences on our local climate. Many studies have been devoted to the study of UHI extent and magnitude, as well as the impacts increased urban temperatures have on meteorology, climatology, human health and society. Although the UHI phenomenon is well documented and studies have increased our understanding, the basic measurement of temperatures across urban areas remains very limited.  To help spatially characterise the UHI, the HiTemp project has provided a nested array of sensors including over 30 weather stations plus an additional 100 air temperature sites located on a citywide wi-fi network.  The end result is the Birmingham Urban Climate Laboratory and is thought to be the densest Urban Meteorological Network in the world.

Biotelemetry/Bio-aerial-platforms for the Urban Boundary Layer (Co-I: Funded by NERC: £661k)

Whilst Urban Meteorological Networks such as the Birmingham Urban Climate Laboratory are starting to provide high resolution meteorological surface datasets in our cities, numerical weather prediction is still hampered by a paucity of meteorological data in the urban boundary layer (UBL), especially in the region above, but close to, building height. This region is precisely where local energy balances and drag combine with prevailing synoptic patterns to transmit fluid dynamical information up and down spatial scales, with implications for (i) urban weather prediction, (ii) event forecasting (e.g. heatwaves, climatic conditions during sporting events, releases of hazardous substances), and (iii) sustainable urban planning for high density liveable cities. However, capturing meteorological data in urban areas above the mean roof height is problematic using conventional techniques. This project will use biotelemetry/bio-aerial-platforms (birds!) as a novel and practicable solution to the data paucity above urban rooftops in the UBL, and to circumvent the regulatory issues related to use of unmanned aerial systems. A suite of low-cost Avian-Meteorology-Instrument Packages for ensemble deployment in Birmingham will be produced to obtain unrivalled data about the spatial nature of the urban boundary layer.

Other Recent Projects:

Internet Of Things Convergence (Co-I, Funded by Technology Strategy Board: £140k)

In 2013, we were funded to partcipate in two 12 month demonstrator grants under the IoT call.  The first project, Smart Streets, was worth £70k and explored the utility of such devices to be used in real world applications such as winter road maintenance and gully cleaning (partners include: Amey, Carillion, Balfour Beatty, InTouch). The second project, DISTANCE (Demonstrating the Internet of School Things – A National Collaborative Experience), also worth £70k, explored the ability for schools to measure and share data by creating an information hub in the cloud using an open-source and infinitely scalable application platform for themes such as transport, energy, weather and health. (Partners include: Intel, Cosm ,the OU, the geography collective and ScienceScope).

FUTURENET (Co-I: Funded by EPSRC: £1.4m)

FUTURENET assessed the future resilience of the UK transport network by taking into account likely technology and infrastructure changes, as well as changes in climate and extreme weather events. FUTURENET recognised that climate change has a significant impact on transport which can be addressed as an engineering dimension derived from the interaction between climate design, weather events and the physical network, and a socio-economic dimension derived from the interaction between weather and climate and the patterns of transport demand. FUTURENET integrated both in assessing the future resilience of the UK transport system. In doing so, it “joins up” traditionally separated agendas and addresses the inter-sectoral consistency of planning assumptions. 

Sustainable Urban Meteorological Networks (SUMNs): Managing the legacy of the Birmingham Urban Climate Laboratory (PI, Funded by NERC: £13k)

This short scoping project investigated ways in which the legacy of the Birmingham Urban Climate Laboratory (HiTemp) could be managed.  The study identified prospective end-users and applications (businesses, industrial, service sector, scientific, public, educational) of the HiTemp project in Birmingham.  The information was used to characterise a sustainable Urban Meteorological Network in terms of size (i.e. number of sites), data quality / assurance and associated ongoing costs. 

Knowledge Transfer Partnership: E-ON Central Networks (PI: Funded by Technology Strategy Board & NERC: £120k)

A Knowledge Transfer Partnership between the University of Birmingham and E-ON, Central Networks evaluated the impact of urban heat islands and climate change on the aging rate of transformers in Birmingham. There are currently 2000 transformers in the Birmingham area, many of which are now over 40 years old; hence replacement is now becoming an important issue. For this to be done successfully, the life cycles of existing transformers requires quantification taking into account various scenarios relating to climate change and urban heat island effects. This project sinvestigated the relationship between weather conditions and asset temperatures, using these relationships to make projections for various climate scenarios so that asset life cycles could be approximated.

Cross Disciplinary Feasibility Account (Co-I: Funded by EPSRC: £200k)

This project investigated improving local resilience through innovation.  A series of stakeholder workshops and multi-disciplinary viewpoint papers were produced to ascertain the potential of 'bottom-up' approaches in improving our local infrastructure.

• President of the Standing International Road Weather Commission
• Head of Climate and Atmospheric Research Sub-Group
• Member of editorial board for RMetS journal Meteorological Applications
• Associate editor of Transport Behaviour and Society
• Member of the NERC Peer Review College