Meet the team
Matthias Roth
My research seeks to understand how land-use changes affect local climates with a particular focus on cities and the role they play in climate change and the application of such knowledge to climate sensitive urban design. As an experimental researcher I have been involved in observations of the urban heat island (UHI), energy balance, carbon dioxide fluxes and fundamental turbulence properties in many cities on three continents.
Pratiman Patel
Pratiman is a postdoctoral research fellow who has a research interest in urban land surface coupling within numerical weather prediction models. Currently, he is working with the Centre for Climate Research Singapore on the MORUSES urban canopy parameterization for uSINGV, a local version of the UK Met Office Unified Model. During his Ph.D., he worked on near real-time flood forecasting using local climate zones in the WRF model.
Website: https://pratiman-91.github.io/
Utkarsh Bhautmage
Utkarsh is a postdoctoral research fellow with an interest in land-atmosphere interaction processes. During his Ph.D. at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, he worked on developing a new computationally efficient multilayer urban model based on non-local ACM2-planetary boundary layer (PBL) scheme and PX-land surface model (LSM) within the WRF model, to improve the urban meteorology modeling in particular winds, vertical structure of the atmosphere, and urban heat island (UHI) effect in large cities. In addition, his research includes creating datasets for urban morphological parameters and enhancing land-use/land-cover information using GIS to run NWP models like WRF effectively. Currently, he is working on the development and assessment of the 100 m uSINGV, a customized version of the UK Met Office Unified Model, to predict extreme rainfall and wind in Singapore.
Ivan Sng Si Yi
Ivan is an undergraduate honours student pursuing his Bachelor of Social Sciences in the Department of Geography, with minors in Geographical Information Systems (GIS), and Urban Studies. His primary research interest lies in how the design and form of cities influence their local climates. Currently, he is working on his Honours Thesis on investigating the mitigating extent of urban greenery on the Urban Heat Island effect in Singapore using remote sensing imagery as an extension of his internship project with the Ministry of Sustainability and the Environment.
So Hoi Kay
I am pursuing my Masters of Social Sciences (Research), after having graduated with a Bachelor in Social Sciences (Geography) from the National University of Singapore. My interest lies in understanding the urban climate of cities, specifically in terms of the Urban Heat Island effect as well as the outdoor thermal comfort. Currently, I am working on my Masters thesis which investigates the seasonal and diurnal variation of urban park surface temperatures across cities of different climatic zones based on remote sensing imagery.
Recent alumni
Yu Minghong
Minghong’s primary interest lies in the field of urban climatology. For his studies he looked at how land cover and built form affect climate variables important for the well-being of people living in Singapore. The aim of this research is to better understand the processes linking urban climate, climate sensitive urban design/green infrastructure and outdoor thermal comfort.
Suraj Harshan obtained his PhD degree in 2015 with a thesis titled Adaptation of an urban land surface model to a tropical suburban area: offline evaluation, sensitivity analysis, and optimisation of TEB/ISBA (SURFEX).
Suli's academic interests are in the field of urban climates and human thermal comfort. Specifically, she is keen on exploring the thermal discomfort she experiences after a thermal step-up or step-down. Her thesis examined the thermal discomfort that pedestrians experienced in their everyday travels, specifically after their transitions from one thermal environment to another. In her thesis, Suli found that pedestrians were capable of aligning their perceptions of surrounding temperature, wind and solar radiation to the actual exposures in the environment.
Beatriz Sanchez
Dr. Beatriz is an urban air quality modeller. She obtained her PhD at the Complutense University of Madrid (Spain). For her PhD, she implemented chemical reactions in a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model to improve the assessment of dynamic, turbulent and chemical processes that take place at the microscale in the urban atmosphere.
Manon Kohler
Manon was a post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Geography. She is trained as an urban climate modeller, and obtained her PhD in Geography from the Université de Strasbourg in France. She worked on the Cooling Singapore research project on assessing heat island mitigation strategies in Singapore.
Andrés Simón-Moral
Andrés Simón was a post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Geography. For his PhD, which he obtained from Complutense University of Madrid (Spain), he improved an urban canopy parameterization scheme to better represent the impact of buildings on wind and temperature fields over cities.
Winston is a Principal Investigator for the multi-institute Cooling Singapore initiative. His previous research projects focused on urban heat island science, impacts and mitigation, as well as on climate change vulnerability in subtropical cities. He is an Associate Professor at SMU since July 2019.
Website: https://faculty.smu.edu.sg/profile/winston-chow-2191
Matthias is an urban climate modeling expert who spent time in the lab in 2014 and 2015, while completing a FWO post-doctoral fellowship at Leuven University. He is currently a Senior Researcher in the Department of Geography at Ruhr University Bochum & Ghent.
Website: https://www.climate.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/team/matthias-demuzere/
