An external view of the Met Office building at night.

Dr Clive Wilson

Areas of expertise

  • Operational NWP
  • Fine scale & limited area modelling
  • Verification of forecasts
  • Diagnostics and validation
  • Renewable energy climatologies

Current activities

Clive manages the development of improved European and UK forecast models. Currently the focus is to improve the new Met Office Numerical Weather Prediction models. The impact of more vertical levels in both the Met Office Numerical Weather Prediction models and UK models is being investigated. Several high resolution limited area models run for commercial use are supported and maintained.

Clive is part of the team developing the Virtual Met Mast tool for wind resources screening to support the wind power industry. This exploits the archived NWP forecasts to downscale to proposed site locations.

Career background

After completing his PhD in theoretical physics, Clive started his career at the Met Office in the Geophysical Fluid-Dynamics branch studying the effect of the atmospheric circulation on the Earth's wobble and length of day.

After several years working on climate change, including running the first coupled atmosphere/slab-ocean model with 2x CO2, Clive's focus has been on improving the operational NWP models. He became manager of the Unified Model development group in 1990 with responsibility for both global and limited area forecast models; since 2002 has been manager of the Mesoscale group. He has been especially concerned with the development of better diagnostic and verification methods to understand the strengths and weaknesses of the operational NWP models.

External recognition

Clive has been active for several years in the European Working Group for Limited Area Modelling. He is chair  of the European SRNWP expert team on verification and diagnostics and is Programme Manager for the EUMETNET SRNWP Verification Programme.

He also participated in the WMO WGNE COMPARE studies.