About Mark McCarthy

Mark is a climate scientist working on observed UK climate variability and change.

Areas of expertise

• Urban climate
• Regional climate prediction
• Land surface modelling
• Climate monitoring

Publications by Mark McCarthy 

Current activities

Mark's work aims to better understand the impact of regional and global climate change on the urban micro-climate. The most apparent expression of the urban micro-climate is the urban heat island. Mark's work links the urban
component of the land surface model development such as the Joint UK Land Environment Simulator (JULES) with the regional and global climate model, exploiting the range of space and time scales provided by the Met Office Unified Model.

A key aspect of this work is in understanding the role of the urban land surface in influencing regional climate. Urban areas will continue to develop through the 21st Century, and this work is quantifying regional climate change and accounting for the potential future drivers of urban climate change through urban growth and energy use.

Mark is involved in widely inter-disciplinary collaborative research projects to bring together climate research with the built environment,social and health sectors to provide improved tools and guidance to inform adaptation and mitigation decisions for urban areas in the UK and elsewhere.

Career background

Mark joined the Met Office Hadley Centre in 1999, where he spent the first 7 years years of his career working in the Climate Monitoring and Attribution team studying observational records of the variability and change in atmospheric water vapour. In that time he also completed a PhD at Imperial College London on the same topic. He then moved to the Climate Impacts group to research urban climate impacts, but has been actively involved in a wide range of projects from the Amazon to the Indian monsoon utilising developments in the land surface scheme within regional and global climate models.