Climate science
Since 2002 I have worked for The Met Office Hadley Centre as a climate scientist.
Mostly I have been collecting and analysing weather observations from the last 250 years - making long, homogenous records of surface weather, which can be used to quantify recent climate changes and to put them in context. This has lead to new historical analyses of sea-surface, land surface, and upper-air temperatures, and surface pressure patterns. I've also been looking at proxy weather data (tree-rings, corals, and pollen samples) from longer ago, and comparing them to climate model simulations.
I'm also interested in using observations and proxy data to validate Climate Models and constrain model-based predictions of future climate.
Current and recent projects
- OldWeather: A citizen-science project to recover worldwide weather observations made by Royal Navy ships around the time of World War I
- Atmospheric Circulation Reconstructions over the Earth (ACRE): Reconstruct the changing state of the atmosphere over the last 200 years.
- CORRAL (UK Colonial Registers and Royal Navy Logbooks): Reconstructing historical climate in the Canadian Arctic.
- New marine observations for the period around World War II
- PalaeoQUMP: Constraining climate sensitivity by looking at the last glacial maximum.
- SO&P (Simulations, observations and Palaeoclimate): Reconstructing the climate of the last 500 years
Case studies and visualisations
- William Parry in the Northwest Passage.
- The First Fleet voyage to Botany Bay.
- Benjamin Franklin's pioneering sea-surface temperature observations.
- The Heroic Age of Antarctic exploration
- The Challenger Expedition
- Weather observations from East-India company ships, 1791-1835