An external view of the Met Office building at night.

Dr Doug Smith

Areas of expertise

  • Monthly to decadal climate prediction, variability and forecast skill.

My Publications - Smith, D

Current activities

Decadal prediction aims to provide guidance for adaptation and mitigation strategies for the coming years to a couple of decades. On these timescales, both natural variability and anthropogenically forced changes must be taken into account. This is achieved using the Met Office Decadal Climate Prediction System: DePreSys. By starting from the observed state of the atmosphere and ocean DePreSys has the potential to predict natural internal variability in addition to the forced response to plausible changes in anthropogenic sources of greenhouse gases and aerosol concentrations, and projected changes in solar irradiance and volcanic aerosol. Experimental decadal forecasts, and verification of previous forecasts, can be found on the Forecasts web page.

 

Career background

Since joining the Met Office in 1997 Doug has developed the Met Office Decadal Climate Prediction System: DePreSys, leading the decadal prediction team since 2008. Before that, Doug worked on satellite remote sensing of sea ice and rainfall at University College London and the University of Bristol. Doug obtained a BSc in Mechanical Engineering, and a PhD in computational fluid dynamics from Imperial College London.

External recognition

  • Lloyds' science of risk prize 2010, overall winner for research showing skilful multi-year predictions of Atlantic hurricane frequency.