Rate My Professor Thorwald Stein

Thorwald Stein is an Associate Professor in Clouds in the Department of Meteorology at the University of Reading. He joined the university in 2008 after completing his PhD in Mathematics from the University of Warwick in 2009, with a thesis titled 'Modelling a large system of particles under different rules of merging,' supervised by Sergey Nazarenko. He advanced to Lecturer in 2015 and currently holds leadership roles as Director of the SCENARIO Doctoral Training Partnership and Director of the Crocus Data Lab Accelerator. Stein's research focuses on the life cycles of clouds and convective storms, microphysical and dynamical processes leading to precipitation, and remote sensing of cloud microphysics and dynamics using satellite and ground-based observations. He develops methods to analyze cloud processes for verifying weather and climate models, studies relationships between cloud occurrences and large-scale dynamics, and designs observational strategies to track convective clouds with multiple radars. Stein leads projects such as WesCon (Observing the Evolving Structures of Turbulence, 2023-present), UPFLO (Improving understanding and modelling of convective updrafts and anvil clouds, 2024-present), UNICon (Utilising Emerging Observation Networks in India for the Evaluation of Convective-Scale Processes, 2025-present), CLOUDY TIME (Convective Cloud-Dynamics-Turbulence Interactions with Microphysics and the Environment, 2023-present), and has contributed to GCRF African SWIFT (2017-2021) for improving weather forecasting in Tropical Africa, DYMECS (2011-2014), and DACCIWA (2014-2015).

His scholarly contributions include highly cited publications such as 'A new, long-term daily satellite-based rainfall dataset for operational monitoring in Africa' (Scientific Data, 2017, 355 citations), 'Mixing-length controls on high-resolution simulations of convective storms' (Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society, 2015, 151 citations), 'The DYMECS project: A statistical approach for the evaluation of convective storms in high-resolution NWP models' (Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 2015, 107 citations), 'The vertical cloud structure of the West African monsoon: A 4 year climatology using CloudSat and CALIPSO' (Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, 2011, 75 citations), and 'Observed relationships between cloud vertical structure and convective aggregation over tropical ocean' (Journal of Climate, 2017, 76 citations). Recent works address severe convection detection using ZDR columns (Meteorological Applications, 2024), convective systems in East Africa (Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society, 2023), and Tropical Africa's testbed for high-impact weather forecasting (Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 2023). Stein supervises postdoctoral researchers and PhD students on topics including precipitation forecasts, tropical precipitation extremes, and boundary-layer structures in cumulus convection.