An external view of the Met Office building at night.

Dr Katy Richardson

Areas of expertise

  • Human security and climate change   
  • Climate data analysis, interpretation and communication  
  • Applied mathematics and fluid dynamics

Publications by Katy Richardson

Current Activities

Katy's role as an Applied Climate Scientist is to contribute to government and commercial funded projects assessing the potential impacts of climate change on human systems. This involves analysis of climate data and projections, and interpretation and communication of the data from the perspective of human security.

Recent activities include:

  • The Human dynamics of climate change communication tool, which puts climate change projections in the context of present-day human activity,
  • Development of the Linking hunger and climate to include climate model projections, enabling rapid assessment of a country's vulnerability to food security and how this may change in the future,
  • Assessment and development of meteorological indicators to inform and understand analysis of global food security, in particular global production shocks.

Career Background

Katy joined the Met Office in June 2012 as part of the Climate Consultancy Development Team working on a range of projects which included providing scientific advice for the International Development Team and extreme value analysis for the energy sector. In July 2013 Katy joined the Climate Security Team where she focuses on the interaction between food security and climate change.

Before joining the Met Office, Katy obtained a PhD in Applied Mathematics from the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, University of Cambridge, where her thesis focused on modelling the solar dynamo; the mechanism for generation of magnetic fields on the sun. Prior to this Katy obtained a first class BSc (Hons) degree in Mathematics from Royal Holloway, University of London.