An external view of the Met Office building at night.

David Sexton

Science Fellow and manager of the Ensemble Climate Prediction team. The focus is on the easy and safe use of UK Climate Information for adaptation planning.

The team build and analyse ensembles of global climate simulations to explore and explain the range of possible future UK weather.

Areas of expertise

  • Designing ensembles to explore a plausible and diverse range of future weather.

  • Using causal frameworks to understand the role of variability and climate change drivers of the UK’s future weather to form the basis for storylines.

  • Using observations to evaluate and weight and automatically calibrate climate models.

  • Making probabilistic climate projections using Bayesian methodology.

Current activities

David leads the team that produced the UKCP Global, the global simulations in our latest set of climate projections for the UK (UKCP18) that inform adaptation.

There are now many more sources of climate information for adaptation, and more different frameworks for making decisions e.g. stories. Storyline approaches help as climate models have limitations which users need to be aware of when making decisions. This presents more challenges for both data providers and users. David is working towards producing storylines and making it easier and safer to use multiple lines of evidence through interactive graphical tools  which facilitate best practice for the use of the data.

A better physical understanding of the climate is required to provide stories and determine best practice. David now works on causal frameworks to capture the key drivers of both the variability and the long-term changes in future weather. This is applied to the large scale e.g. winter North Atlantic/European circulation, and to extreme UK rainfall. The aim is to provide information of future projections in terms of how the model projections might change if the limitations in those models were resolved.

Career background

David joined the Met Office Hadley Centre in August 1993, after studying Maths at Cambridge University. David spent the first nine years working on detection and attribution of anthropogenic climate change. This period culminated in a PhD in 2001 on experimental design and statistical modelling of climate model experiments, done jointly with the Met Office and Reading University. In 2002, David moved to the Climate Prediction group to work on climate prediction and led the teams that made UKCP09 and UKCP18 Global. In 2024, David became a Science Fellow.

External Recognition

  • Fellow of Royal Meteorological Society, 2006.

  • Winner of the L G Groves Memorial Prize for Meteorology, 2008, for his work on UKCP09.