About Simon Good

Simon works on observations of the subsurface of the ocean.

Areas of expertise:

• Ocean subsurface temperature and salinity observations.

• Quality control.

• Observational biases and uncertainties.

Publications by Simon Good

Current activities

Simon is responsible for the maintenance and development of the quality control system for ocean subsurface observations, which he uses to produce the EN3 dataset of ocean subsurface temperature and salinity data. The EN3 products are freely available for private study and research purposes from the Met Office Hadley Centre observations webpages. The data are used for a variety of purposes both within the Met Office and externally, including for initialising decadal forecasts and for evaluating model outputs. Part of Simon's role is to use the data to determine how the heat content of the oceans has changed over time, and to understand the level of uncertainty in those heat content estimates.

A current focus of Simon's work is to understand and eliminate biases in the ocean data. This research includes the examination of biases in XBT profiles of ocean temperatures, which make up a significant part of the historical record. The work is aimed at understanding the differences between schemes that have been proposed to remove these biases and to determine how best to apply them in the EN3 dataset. He is also working towards generating uncertainty estimates for the ocean subsurface data.

Career background

Simon joined the Met Office in February 2008. Prior to this, he studied for a PhD at the University of Leicester, the topic of which was an investigation of the physical properties of white dwarf stars. After completing his PhD he worked as a post-doctoral research associate, studying retrievals of sea surface temperature from satellite data in the  Earth Observation Science research group at the University of Leicester. Immediately before joining the Met Office, he worked at  QinetiQ on the processing and analysis of synthetic aperture radar data.