Ensemble prediction systems aim to account for uncertainties of initial conditions and model error. Ensemble forecasting is sometimes viewed as a method of obtaining (objective) probabilistic forecasts. How is one to judge the quality of an ensemble at forecasting a system? The probability that...

Nigeria is one of the countries most affected by the HIV/AIDS pandemic, third only to India and South Africa. With about 10% of the global HIV/AIDS cases estimated to be in the country, the public health and socio-economic implications are enormous.This thesis has two broad aims: the first is to...

This paper presents an approach to estimating the health effects of an environmental hazard. The approach is general in nature, but is applied here to the case of air pollution. It uses a computer model involving ambient pollution and temperature input to simulate the exposures experienced by...

This paper investigates the nature of model error in complex deterministic nonlinear systems such as weather forecasting models. Forecasting systems incorporate two components, a forecast model and a data assimilation method. The latter projects a collection of observations of reality into a...

In times of ever increasing financial constraints on public weather services it is of growing importance to communicate the value of their forecasts and products. While many diagnostic tools exist to evaluate forecast systems, intuitive diagnostics for communicating the skill of probabilistic...

The relationship between short-term exposure to air pollution and mortality or morbidity has been the subject of much recent research, in which the standard method of analysis uses Poisson linear or additive models. In this paper, we use a Bayesian dynamic generalised linear model (DGLM) to...