Many congratulations to Prof Cotter for being awarded the EPSRC Impact Acceleration grant

An EPSRC Impact Acceleration grant was awarded to Co-I Colin Cotter to fund a research associate (Dr Jack Betteridge) for six months from October 1 2019 to March 30 2020 to accelerate the impact of EPSRC-funded research (through the Mathematics of Planet Earth Centre for Doctoral Training) on hybridisable implicit solvers for atmospheric dynamical cores using compatible finite element methods. These hybridisable methods allow for simple elimination of velocity, temperature and density to obtain a single equation for pressure variables on cell faces that can be efficiently solved before reconstructing velocity, temperature and density again. The Met Office dynamical core (the fluid dynamics component) uses compatible finite element methods that were developed by Colin and collaborators within the Gung Ho project, and there is an opportunity to improve the performance of the model through these new hybridisable methods. Jack worked with the Met Office Dynamics Research team to identify the components within their LFRic parallel software framework that would need to be used and adapted in order to adopt the hybridisation technique. In the course of this work, Colin and Jack invented a new iterative solver approach for the cell face pressure variable equation that can be easily built within LFRic, which was benchmarked in the Firedrake runtime code generation library led by PRISM Co-I David Ham. Met Office staff are now evaluating this approach in their own test environment.