Areas of expertise:

• Climate change mitigation

• Climate extremes

• Observations and datasets

Current activities

John currently works on the AVOID programme, which aims to investigate the climatic consequences of defined climate policies and mitigation strategies. One aspect of this is to explore the changes in climate extremes which might result from different greenhouse gas emissions scenarios during the 21st century. New understanding from this work will be used to provide advice to the government on the impacts of different emissions pathways and policies.
 
John also continues to work with observational climate datasets, including the  HadGHCND daily temperature monitoring dataset developed jointly with the United States National Climatic Data Center. He has also been involved with the series of international extremes workshops run by the joint WMO CCl/CLIVAR/JCOMM Expert team on climate change detection and indices.

Career background

Before moving into the Climate Change Mitigation Advice team, John joined the Met Office Hadley Centre in 2002 and spent a number of years working on climate extremes, observational datasets, and climate model evaluation in the Climate Monitoring & Attribution area and the Extreme Events team. 

As an undergraduate, John studied Environmental Sciences at the  University of East Anglia and followed this with a PhD in the  Climatic Research Unit on the interaction between the Asian monsoon and sea surface temperature patterns.