Remote team meeting (3rd June 2020), across from the top left: Penny Maher, Will Seviour, Neil Lewis, Marianne Pietschnig, Geoff Vallis, Ruth Geen, Ross Castle, John Bruun, Brett McKim, Qun Liu, Matthew Henry, Denis Sergeev, Stephen Thomson, Daniel Williams.

Isca development team @ Exeter

The Isca development team includes the following:

Prof. Geoff Vallis — the BDFN (Benevolent Dictator For Now)

Geoff envisioned Isca and has overseen the project. He also knows when to keep out of the way.

Dr. John Bruun

John looks at the mechanisms that form planetary resonaces, and especially the ocean-atmosphere ENSO phenomenon. He joined the Isca team in 2018 - this GFD model helps his work by identifying seasonal and longer term system properties

Ross Castle

Ross uses Isca to investigate changes in Earth’s general circulation due to climate change. He has been working on implementing the gravity wave drag schemes in the model.

Dr. Ruth Geen

Ruth has helped in development of Isca since 2016. She uses it to perform idealised simulations to study the dynamics of Earth’s large-scale overturning circulations, particularly monsoons.

Dr. Matthew Henry

Matthew joined the team in March 2020 after working with the GFDL model for his PhD. He uses Isca to understand the warming pattern under increased greenhouse gas concentrations.

Qun Liu

Qun has been working on implementing simple cloud schemes in Isca. He is currently using them to investigate the cloud radiative effect response to climate change.

Dr. Penelope Maher

Penny has been a developer of Isca since 2015 and its predecessor the GFDL aquplanet model (on which Isca is founded) since 2010. She specialises in convection, clouds and the large-scale circulation of the atmosphere.

Brett McKim

Brett joined the Isca group in 2019 and is using the framework to study how the general circulation modifies water vapour's greenhouse effect.

Marianne Pietschnig

Marianne joined the Isca group in 2017 and is using the modelling framework to gain an understanding of tropical precipitation change with global warming

Dr. Denis Sergeev

Denis is interested in the physical processes in various planetary atmospheres, focusing particularly on convection, microphysical processes, and the habitability of terrestrial exoplanets. He has been helping to develop Isca since 2020.

Dr. Will Seviour

Will uses Isca for research into the atmospheric dynamics of Earth, Mars, and Titan. He has helped in porting Isca to systems at Johns Hopkins University and the University of Bristol.

Dr. Stephen Thomson

Stephen began the original work of creating Isca in 2015, merging MiMA with code from GFDL. He has since added many features, and has configured Isca for Jupiter, Mars and Titan. Stephen's main interests are in large-scale dynamics of planets, including Earth.

Daniel Williams

Dan joined the Isca group in 2020 and is investigating the climate dynamics of Titan, the largest moon of Saturn.

Isca developers elsewhere

We are very grateful for the contributions of several developers outside Exeter, listed here. For a more up-to-date list of contributors please see our Github repository.

Dr. Greg Colyer (University of Oxford)

Dr. Martin Jucker (University of New South Wales)

Dr. Wanying Kang (MIT)

Neil Lewis (University of Oxford)

Matthew McKinney (UCLA)

Dr. Dann Mitchell (University of Bristol)

Nathanael Wong (Harvard University)

Alumni

Some members of the Isca team have now moved on to better things.

Name	Previous position	Position now
Dr James Penn	PhD Student (Exeter), 2015-2019	Deloitte Sustainability
Regan Mudhar	MSci Student (Bristol), 2018-2019	Bank of America
George Lancaster	MS Student (Bristol), 2018-2019	Just Eat

Past team photos