An external view of the Met Office building at night.

Dr Richard Levine

Areas of expertise

  • Modelling of monsoon systems.

  • Tracking monsoon depressions.

  • Modelling climatic impact of ice-sheet disintegration, palaeo-ice streams and icebergs.

Publications by Dr Richard Levine

Current activities

Richard's work contributes towards improving regional predictions of the Unified Model for India and Africa, and is a member of the Global Water Cycle team. He focuses on the monsoon systems in these areas, studying physical processes such as synoptic-scale monsoon depressions and local atmosphere-ocean interaction and their representations in the model. Evaluating the model simulations of these processes, and understanding how they are impacted by changes to physical parameterizations, helps to improve both our understanding of monsoons and systematic model errors in the Unified Model simulation. The seamless nature of the model is often utilised in this work in order to understand the time-scales involved in the build-up of the model biases, by analysing the evolution of the errors in five-day forecasts to seasonal and decadal climate predictions.

Career background

Richard joined the Met Office Hadley Centre in 2008. Before that, Richard was a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Sheffield working on modelling the climatic impact of rapid ice-sheet disintegration as part of the NERC RAPID climate change programme. Before that, Richard completed a PhD at the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton, using a high-resolution ocean model (OCCAM) to study the Arctic Ocean circulation. As an undergraduate Richard studied Mathematics at the University of Groningen (the Netherlands) and gained an MSc specialising in Numerical Mathematics and Fluid Dynamics.