Areas of interest
Anne's major interest is the exchange of heat, water vapour, CO2 and momentum between soil, vegetation and atmosphere; soil physical processes, including the flows of water, heat and gases.
In most of her projects, detailed micrometeorological, soil physical, plant physiological and remote sensing data are combined with land surface models and/or soil models.
Currently, specific research interests comprise:
Postgraduate supervision
Anne welcomes enquiries from potential PhD students in the study of the following topics: soil physics, land surface processes, hydrometeorology, micrometeorology, remote sensing.
Research projects
- SINATRA: Susceptibility of catchments to INTense RAinfall and flooding
- FUSE: Floodplain Underground SEnsors project
- Mitigation potential of horizontal ground coupled heat pumps
- SWELTER-21
Examples of previous projects/interests:
- PASQUAL project: "Monitoring and prediction of pasture quality and productivity from satellites" . Funded by Innovate-UK "Satellites and Agri-Food)" programme. Business lead: Rezatec
- The effect of the hydrothermal and nutrient regime on the vegetation functioning of a floodplain meadow (Floodplain Underground SEnsors - FUSE)
- The interaction between the environment and horizontal ground source heat pumps (GROMIT project)
Background
Anne completed a combined BSc/MSc in Agricultural and Environmental Sciences (1990; MSc Thesis in Soil Physics, Micrometeorology and Hydrology) and a PhD (1995) in Micrometeorology at Wageningen University (The Netherlands).
She then held an EC-funded postdoctoral position at the Institute of Hydrology (Wallingford, UK, now CEH-Wallingford), working on physiologically-based models of vegetation dynamics for improved description of land surface-atmosphere interactions in climate models.
She joined the Department as Lecturer in Environmental Physics in 1999. She has over 25 years of experience with land surface modelling (eg JULES and SCOPE model), as well as with soil physical, hydrometeorological and plant-physiological measurement methods.
Experimental field-sites included a rainfed vineyard in Central Spain (EFEDA), a savannah in Niger (HAPEX-Sahel), an olive grove in Southern Spain, Caatinga forest in NE Brazil, and agricultural fields (Sonning campaign, GROMIT project, PASQUAL, LANDWISE) and a floodplain meadow (FUSE Project) in the UK.
Her research is predominantly funded by NERC (and more recently Innovate-UK). Over the years, she has built up a large portfolio of research grants mostly relating to applied and theoretical environmental science, broadly in the context of water-, food- and energy security, and related impacts of weather extremes (flooding, droughts).
She currently co-leads the University of Reading's Land Surface Processes Research luster. She has co-led the Hydrology science module for the UKMO JULES land surface model since 2015, has been an executive board member of the International Soil Modelling Consortium since 2017 and been a member of the GEWEX GLASS panel, where she has co-led the GEWEX Soil and Water (SoilWat) initiative since 2018.
She was an Associate Editor (2018- 2019) for the Elsevier journal Agriculture and Forest Meteorology and is currently Associate Editor (2016-) for the SSSA Vadose Zone journal.
Verhoef A., Allen, S.J., (2000). A SVAT scheme describing energy and CO2 fluxes for multi-component vegetation: calibration and test for a Sahelian savannah. Ecological Modelling 127 245-267.
Wallace, J.S. and Verhoef, A. (2000). Interactions in mixed-plant communities: light, water and carbon dioxide. In: Leaf development and canopy growth. Editors: B. Marshall And J. Roberts. Sheffield Biological Science Series, Sheffield Academic Press, pp 204-250.
Verhoef A., Allen, S.J. and Lloyd, C.R. (1999). Seasonal variation of surface energy balance over two Sahelian surfaces. International Journal of Climatology 19 1267-1277.
Verhoef, A., and Allen, S.J. (1998). The relative importance of surface and aerodynamic resistances in a multi-source energy-CO2 model. Physics and Chemistry of the Earth 23 459-463.
Jacobs, A.F.G., and Verhoef, A. (1997). Soil evaporation from sparse natural vegetation estimated from Sherwood numbers. Journal of Hydrology 188-189 443-452.
Moncrieff, J.B. Monteny, B. Verhoef, A., Friborg, Th., Elbers, J., Kabat, P., de Bruin, H., Soegaard, H., Jarvis, P.G., and Taupin, J.D. (1997). Spatial and temporal variations in net carbon flux during HAPEX-Sahel. Journal of Hydrology 188-189 563-588.
Verhoef, A., De Bruin, H.A.R. and Van den Hurk, B.J.J.M. (1997). Some practical notes on the parameter kB-1 for sparse canopies. Journal of Applied Meteorology 36 560-572.
Verhoef, A., McNaughton, K.G., and Jacobs, A.F.G. (1997). A parameterization of momentum roughness length and displacement height for a wide range of canopy densities. Hydrology and Earth Systems Sciences 1 81-91.
Verhoef A. (1997). The effect of temperature differences between porometer head and leaf surface on stomatal conductance measurements. Plant, Cell & Environment 20 641-646.
