An external view of the Met Office building at night.

Dr Tim Andrews

Areas of expertise

  • Radiative forcing and climate feedbacks
  • Climate sensitivity and its utility/limitations
  • Transient climate change and heat uptake
  • Links between the global energy and water cycles

My publications

Current activities

Tim's work aims to improve our understanding of climate change by evaluating climate change mechanisms and processes. He is interested in understanding how different climate forcing agents perturb the Earth's energy budget and how this relates to climate responses on different timescales. The bulk of Tim's work involves running climate model experiments to diagnose forcing, feedbacks and heat uptake in the climate system. Recently, Tim has been involved in assessing the sensitivity of our new earth system model, Met Office climate prediction model: HadGEM2 family, to radiative forcing. This allows him to quantify the importance of the earth system in climate change, compared to the more the physical drivers of climate change.

Tim also works on the links between the global energy and water cycles. He is trying to understand how different climate forcing agents, such carbon dioxide or black carbon, perturb the atmospheric and surface energy budgets, and how this influences global precipitation. Hopefully this might lead to improved predictions of regional precipitation changes.

Career background

Tim joined the Climate sensitivity and feedbacks group in Met Office Hadley Centre in 2010. Prior to that, Tim completed a PhD at the University of Leeds on "A surface perspective on radiative forcing of climate", under the supervision of Prof. Piers Forster. As an undergraduate, Tim completed an MPhys in Theoretical Physics and an MRes in Atmospheric and Earth Physics, both at the University of Leeds.