Keith J. Roberts

Keith is an expert in numerical modeling and geophysical sciences, including meteorology and oceanography, with a focus on developing and applying advanced computational methods. His expertise includes software programming for numerical and data-driven models (FORTRAN, C, C++, Python), metocean characterization, weather and ocean circulation modeling, and coastal flood and wave hazard assessment for engineering and insurance applications.

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Core Areas of Expertise:​

• Coastal and Ocean Hydrodynamics

  • Modeling coastal hydrodynamics and wave (phase averaged and phase resolved) processes in nearshore & offshore  domains.

  • Semi-automatic mesh generation for 2D/3D multi scale geophysical domains for numerical simulation, including coastal oceans, lakes, rivers, floodplains, cityscapes and subsurface environments.

• Scientific Computing & Data manipulation, management and analysis

  • Experience with numerical simulation of geophysical processes using distributed computing.

  • Parallel programming in C and FORTRAN with MPI.

  • Python and MATLAB for general (geo)spatial data analysis, statistical modeling, and visualization. 

• Numerical Methods

  • Implementation of finite difference & finite element methods.

    •  Using FORTRAN & C.

    • Using Domain-specific languages (Firedrake & FEniCS)

  • Application of mesh-free Lagrangian methods for solving fluid-flow processes in engineering domains (i.e., Potential Flows, Euler Equations).

• Meteorology

  • Forecasting synoptic weather.

  • Extreme weather: tropical & non-tropical cyclones

    • Focus on modeling winds in the Planetary Boundary Layer (PBL).

    • Hindcasting extreme events using parametric & Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) approaches.

  • Knowledge of atmospheric processes and general circulation. 

• Seismology

  • Full waveform inversion (FWI) for seismic (i.e., P & S wave inversion) velocity model development.

    • Time-domain FWI techniques using finite elements with high order mass lumped elements.