Greetings, welcome to my web page.

Once I wanted to be a fire engine driver. Then I accidentally did well at some things at school, and wanted to go to university. You can't get a degree in fire engine driving, so I decided to go in for subnuclear quantum physics. I found myself spending most of my time making the big calculators work better, so after I graduated I looked to do something computational. Three years later I got my doctorate in modelling radar rainfall data, and decided I wanted to give the world the greatest forecasting system of all time. Ten years later I had gone around three loops of funding cycles, each taking me back to square one, so I went to find something commercial so that I could make a lasting visible contribution to the world. For a time I found my place developing software implementing e-commerce based at the Amsterdam outpost of a Massachusetts company. Then the dot-com bubble burst and the company turned its toes up. Back to square one again.

And square one is: the Underpinning Technologies Group of the Section for Earth Observation at the Monks Wood site of the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, a research arm of the Natural Environment Research Council. I am still in the process of developing a revamped Underpinning Technologies Group, but there is an embryonic web site.

If I find spare time and spare energy, I hack. I hack my house, cars, computer, web server, mathematical models, science fiction... if it's hackable, I'll have a go. If it doesn't look like it belongs to me, it soon will. This page is a summary of my hacking activities, for your amusement.

If you feel compelled to comment or just to say hi, I'm at dale-at-rdmp.org (but put a proper at-sign in); if you need to speak in confidence you can encrypt with my GPG key stored on the main PGP keyservers.

Enjoy!

Public projects

• CEH Phenology Observatory of Great Britain
  

  This is my main current development for CEH, and is in its very early stage of conception (pre-beta). It is a project to monitor the dynamic state of vegetation growth on the ground, for the whole of the British mainland.

  The raw satellite data are furnished to us from the Dundee Satellite Receiving Station, and are downloaded to the site every day; the processing line in the observatory is fully automatic, so that images appear very soon after the satellite makes its pass over the country (usually shortly before midday).

  It can be accessed at http://utg.ceh.ac.uk/phenology, but note that it may be quite broken until it gets out of beta.

• The Village

  I have recently become involved with the online UK deaf community through various forums, and felt that the community would do better with a more immersive kind of online environment, in which the members would feel more like part of a village community. The development is still in the first phase (although very advanced by now), but eventually I hope to have a spatial interface, so that people really will feel that they are moving through a village as they peruse discussion threads. In the meantime, I am running the software myself for groups who need it: the home page is http://tribalvillages.org. At the moment, there is a single instance created for the UK hard-of-hearing community, and it is at http://tribalvillages.org/deaf.

  
  
• Rainfall Data Modelling Portal

  Fallout from my Ph.D. days. Seems a shame to let the accumulated intellect go to waste... This system is based on the Internet superserver which I am fortunate enough to own. It's got pipes fat enough for a person to run down... The RDMP system itself is at http://www.rdmp.org The RDMP development hub

  
  
• Interoperable environmental modelling WebRing

  In a further attempt at making a community of interoperable software developers, I have set up this web ring. It has been advertised on several mailing lists, but hardly a soul has elected to join yet... The home page is http://www.rdmp.org/iemw.

  
  
• BookBlog

  One day I decided to catalogue my collection of books (as I was starting to lose track of all the storylines), so I wrote this software which allows me to write my thoughts down after reading each new book, and then just for free they become available to anyone else who might be interested. The software development page is http://bookblog.sourceforge.net; My own BookBlog is at http://rdmp.org:20202/bookblog.

  
  
• GNU The coolest operating system on the planet. Sat astride a 2.6.X Linux kernel, and draped in a flowing Gnome2 ballgown, it howls in the face of Wind's 200X inches/hr. Such is the system I've built from scratch and now maintain exclusively on all my PCs.

  Copyright © 2003 Free Software Foundation

  Artwork Yep, I confess, I did it, I went and painted the melancholy wildebeest... 48 pixels (1 kB) | 256 pixels (10 kB) | 480 pixels (25 kB) | 1055 pixels (90 kB) Mcron Look, deep down I'm a hard-as-nails programmer. It's inevitable I got round to giving some of the talent over to GNU... Home page Savannah development site White paper Manual GNUbik I must have wasted half my youth on these silly cubes, now I'm wasting... just wasting! This isn't exactly my program, but I did add the Script-fu subsystem and the AI to solve the blasted thing. The project is hosted on Savannah. Fab If I get round to it, this'll be another chunk of time and talent...

• The meadow

  This is my little pet project to develop an interactive photo-realistic picture of a meadow. The project has no defined structure - I will simply add a little something to it every now and then, and we'll see what it grows into! The latest snapshot is shown here. Remember that with the real thing you can move around the scene. Home page SourceForge development page.

• Gateshead Online
  

  An effort to give the small shop keepers of Gateshead an online service. Never really took off, never really put enough effort into it. Located at http://gateshead-online.co.uk.

Painting

Crafting code's one way to relax, and get a high when it all works. However, sometimes you just have to get away from the shackles of syntax and do something freeform. Below are some of the less constrained hacks I've done...

Sometime Mellormobile, the Golden Eagle

, long since deceased but not forgotten...

Pictures of my living room. Painting this has been a great way to pass three years of dark winter Sundays...

A couple of other things from former occupations.

Public, and references to non-public, writings

Mcron white paper, version 1.0, June 2003

Fab white paper (in production)

a fun sci-fi screenplay I wrote for television and am now releasing to the public.

Non-parametric MTB rainfall forecasting system, version 2.0, February 2003 (unfinished)

Mellor, D., Sheffield, J., O'Connell, P. E. and Metcalfe, A. V. (2000)
	A stochastic space-time rainfall forecasting system for real time flow forecasting. I. Development of MTB conditional rainfall scenario generator.
	Hydrol. Earth System Sci., 4, 603-615.

Mellor, D., Sheffield, J., O'Connell, P. E. and Metcalfe, A. V. (2000)
	A stochastic space-time rainfall forecasting system for real time flow forecasting. II. Application of SHETRAN and ARNO rainfall runoff models to the Brue catchment.
	Hydrol. Earth System Sci., 4, 617-626.

Mellor, D. and Metcalfe, A. V. (1996)
	The Modified Turning Bands (MTB) model for space-time rainfall. I. Model definition and properties.
	J. Hydrol., 175, 113-127.

Mellor, D. and Metcalfe, A. V. (1996)
	The Modified Turning Bands (MTB) model for space-time rainfall. II. Estimation of raincell parameters.
	J. Hydrol., 175, 129-159.

Mellor, D. and Metcalfe, A. V. (1996)
	The Modified Turning Bands (MTB) model for space-time rainfall. III. Estimation of the storm/rainband profile and discussion of the future model prospects.
	J. Hydrol., 175, 161-180.

Mellor, D. (1993)
	The Modified Turning Bands (MTB) Model for space-time rainfall.
	Ph. D. Thesis, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK

Other sundries

You can read my BookBlog here.

Here is my stuffy commercial