Leonard Smith

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Professor of Statistics, London School of Economics

Visiting Professor, Department of Statistics, University of Chicago

 

 

Areas of Expertise:

  • Theory of nonlinear dynamical systems: Indistinguishable states, model estimation and system analysis
  • Construction and evaluation of ensemble forecasting systems of actual systems
  • Forecast interpretation for decision support in energy, insurance and other sectors on weather, seasonal and climate timescales

Smith serves as the Director of the Centre for the Analysis of Time Series (CATS) at the London School of Economics. Smith received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Florida and PhD in Physics from Columbia University.

He has held visiting or fixed term research positions at Cambridge (UK), École Normale Superior (France), Warwick (UK) and Potsdam University (Germany). Since 1992 he has been a Senior Research Fellow (mathematics) at Pembroke College and Research Associate, Mathematics Institute, University of Oxford, (UK), and also became a Professor of Statistics (Research) at the London School of Economics (LSE) in October 2004.

Smith has held grants funded by many bodies including ONR (US Office of Naval Research) and NOAA (US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) as well as from Australia, the European Commission and the UK Research Councils. Smith was active in the formation of strategy for THORPEX (he was co-author of the Socio-Economic Impacts Chapter) and the original experimental design(s) of climateprediction.net.

His interest in the public understanding of science led to a Selby Fellowship from the Australian Academy of Sciences. In recognition of his contributions to mathematically-coherent, user-relevant developments in meteorology, the Royal Meteorological Society awarded Professor Smith its Fitzroy Prize in 2003.

Research Projects

Model Evaluation and Fidelity | Shadowing

Former Students and Postdoctoral Scholars 

Hailiang Du | Ana Lopez

publications
Joshua Elliott et al. "Predicting Agricultural Impacts of Large-Scale Drought: 2012 and the Case for Better Modeling" (2013). RDCEP Working Paper Series No. 13-01.
Frigg, Roman, Leonard A. Smith, and David A. Stainforth. "The myopia of imperfect climate models: the case of UKCP09." Philosophy of science 80, no. 5 (2013): 886-897.
Roman Frigg, Seamus Bradley, Hailiang Du, and Leonard A Smith. Laplaces demon and the adventures of his apprentices. Philosophy of Science, 81(1):31–59, 2014.
Roman Frigg et al. "Probabilistic forecasting: Why model imperfection is a poison pill." New Challenges to Philosophy of Science. Springer Netherlands; (2013):479-491.
Roman Frigg, Leonard A Smith, and David A Stainforth. An assessment of the foundational assumptions in high-resolution climate projections: the case of ukcp09. Synthese, pages 1–30, 2015.
W Hazeleger, BJJM Van den Hurk, E Min, GJ Van Oldenborgh, AC Petersen, DA Stainforth, E Vasileiadou, and LA Smith. Tales of future weather. Nature Climate Change, 5(2):107–113, 2015.
Ana Lopez, Emma B Suckling, and Leonard A Smith. Robustness of pattern scaled climate change scenarios for adaptation decision support. Climatic change, 122(4):555–566, 2014
Lopez, Ana, Emma B. Suckling, and Leonard A. Smith. "Robustness of pattern scaled climate change scenarios for adaptation decision support." Climatic change 122, no. 4 (2014): 555-566.
Daniel J. Rowlands et al. "Broad range of 2050 warming from an observationally constrained large climate model ensemble." Nature Geoscience 5, no. 4 (2012): 256-260.
Leonard A. Smith and Arthur Petersen. Variations on reliability: Connecting climate predictions to climate policy. Error and Uncertainty in Scientific Practice, 2014
Leonard A. Smith, Hailiang Du, Emma B. Suckling, and Falk Niehrster. Probabilistic skill in ensemble seasonal forecasts. Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society, 2014.
Smith, Leonard A., Hailiang Du, Emma B. Suckling, and Falk Niehrster. "Probabilistic skill in ensemble seasonal forecasts." Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society (2014).
Leonard A. Smith et al. "Variations on reliability: Connecting climate predictions to climate policy." Error and uncertainty in scientific practice. London, UK: Pickering & Chatto; (2014):137-156.
Stainforth, David A., and Leonard A. Smith. "Policy: Clarify the limits of climate models." Nature 489, no. 7415 (2012): 208-208.
Suckling, Emma B., and Leonard A. Smith. "An Evaluation of Decadal Probability Forecasts from State-of-the-Art Climate Models*." Journal of Climate 26, no. 23 (2013): 9334-9347.
Keith Beven et al. "On virtual observatories and modelled realities (or why discharge must be treated as a virtual variable)." Hydrological Processes 26, no. 12 (2012): 1905-1908.
S Bradley et al. Model error and ensemble forecasting: a cautionary tale. Selected Papers from the International Conference on SEMS 2012, World Scientific, 2014.
Hailiang Du and Leonard A Smith. Pseudo-orbit data assimilation. part i: The perfect model scenario. Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences, 71(2):469–482, 2014.
Du, Hailiang, and Leonard A. Smith. "Parameter estimation through ignorance." Physical Review E 86, no. 1 (2012): 016213.
Hailiang Du and Leonard A. Smith. Beyond proper score: The importance of being local. in preparation for Annals of Statistics, 2016