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Dr Joan Bech is Associate Professor at the Department of Astronomy and Meteorology, University of Barcelona (UB), Spain. He holds a degree in Physics (UB Physics School), a postgraduate course in Environmental Pollution (UB Chemistry School) and a PhD in Physics (UB Physics School). From 1997 to 2009 he was responsible of weather radar systems managing a network of 4 C-band Doppler radars and related applications at the Meteorological Service of Catalonia (NE Spain) where later, until 2011, was Head of Remote Sensing in charge of weather radar, total lightning data and satellite systems and applications. He was fellow researcher at the UK Meteorological Office weather radar group, postdoctoral researcher at the Research and Development Department of the Norwegian Meteorological Service and Invited Professor at the University of Grenoble, France. He was national delegate in the Managing Committees of the European concerted actions COST-717 and COST-731 dealing with weather radar applications.
Since 2003 he has been teaching postgraduate meteorological remote sensing at UB and weather radar courses for several institutions including training for the Honduras Civil Protection Authority (COPECO) or the Mexican National Weather Service (CONAGUA) and the Aeronautical Air Traffic Control Authority (SENEAM) related to recent installations of operational polarimetric weather radars and a wind-shear detection system at the Mexico city international airport.
His current research interests include analysis of atmospheric processes leading to heavy precipitation events, severe weather thunderstorms or development of quality control for weather radar systems as well as other topics related to atmospheric physics and environmental quality. As of June 2015 he is author of 53 scientific articles indexed in Web of Science and co-editor, with Prof. K. Chau (currently at the Leibniz-Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Germany), of the open access book "Doppler radar observations" freely available at http://dx.doi.org/ 10.5772/2036. |
