Professor Lizzie Kendon

This includes exploring climate sensitivity and feedbacks, developing and exploiting high resolution climate models to provide new insights into future changes in local weather extremes, and producing improved climate information, including through the use of new AI methods.

Lizzie also has a joint Met Office Academic Partnership (MOAP) position at Bristol University as Professor in the Faculty of Science, exploiting new high resolution climate projections for impacts modelling and user applications.

Areas of expertise

• Future changes in local weather extremes
• Regional climate projections for UK, Europe and Africa
• High resolution (km-scale) climate modelling

Publications by Lizzie Kendon

Current activities

Lizzie leads a team of 40 scientists and science managers on understanding climate processes and improving climate projections. She also has a joint Met Office Bristol University academic position as a Professor in the Faculty of Science, with the aim of building collaborations to exploit new high-resolution climate modelling capability in impacts modelling and for user applications.

Lizzie is currently leading the REsilience and PReparedness to tropical cyclones across Southern Africa (REPRESA) project funded by the Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) and the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), under the CLARE initiative. She is one of the three co-leads on REPRESA, working alongside Francois Engelbrecht (Wits Global Climate Institute in South Africa) and Luis Artur (Eduardo Mondlane University in Mozambique). REPRESA started in June 2023 and aims to exploit new km-scale model runs for Africa, coupled to hydrological and storm surge models, to gain understanding of changing tropical cyclone risks in southern Africa. It involves partners across the UK and southern Africa, including local Met Agencies and the Red Cross, to pull-through scientific advances, improve early warning systems, address barriers to early warning system uptake, and inform adaptation options in the context of intersecting vulnerabilities.

Lizzie is also leading a NERC pushing the frontiers project FUTURE-FLOOD. This will provide new flood estimates across the UK bringing together state-of-the-art high resolution climate projections (UKCP Local) with advanced flood modelling capability. This builds on a pilot study, which identified the key benefits in terms of providing new insights into flood risk at local scales needed by users for adaptation planning. Local and national-scale demonstrators are being co-developed with decision makers to take the new flood information through to improving resilience, assessing the scope for and benefits of adaptive action.

Lizzie is the senior supplier on AI work for climate at the UK Met Office, responsible for ensuring key flagship projects developing AI climate models meet strategic aims of the office, providing a scientific steer and ensuring technical integrity of the projects. She is a key partner on the NERC funded FURFLEX project developing and applying a Bristol diffusion ML downscaling model (Addison et al, 2024) to support flood risk assessment and recently led a key international perspective paper on the potential for ML models to augment km-scale climate projections (Kendon et al, 2025). Lizzie is on CORDEX task forces, helping to shape the strategic direction of European coordinated activities on convection-permitting modelling and AI for climate downscaling.

Career background

Lizzie has 20 years’ experience working on regional climate modelling at the UK Met Office. She has pioneered the field of km-scale climate modelling, with high-profile publications in Nature Climate Change (Kendon et al 2014) and Nature Comms (Kendon et al 2019, Kendon et al 2023). This has included running the first km-scale climate simulations over the UK, Europe and Africa, with work focussing on gaining a better understanding of extreme rainfall processes and their future change.  She led the production and delivery of the first national climate scenarios at convection-permitting scale, the “UKCP Local” projections, with the first fully transient 100-year projections at km-scale launched in 2023 (Kendon et al 2023) and subsequent additional members in 2024 (Short & Kendon, 2024).

Previously she has played a key role in international research projects including the Horizon 2020 EUCP project, involving carrying out coordinated convection-permitting climate simulations over Europe, and the FCFA IMPALA project, involving convection-permitting climate simulations over Africa. She also had a key role in numerous multi-institutional projects, including the NERC STORMY-WEATHER, NERC FUTURE-STORMS, UKRI FUTURE-DRAINAGE and ERC INTENSE projects, developing and exploiting km-scale climate models to understand changes in high-impact events and translating this into user-relevant information. She led an important international review paper on the need for convection-permitting resolution for reliable future projections (Kendon et al 2017) and on the outlook for convection-permitting modelling (Kendon et al 2021), as well as a recent perspective paper on the potential for AI approaches to augment high resolution regional climate projections (Kendon et al 2025).

Lizzie has extensive experience engaging with users, through the delivery of UKCP Local. She was a contributing author on the IPCC AR6 WG2 report and the latest UK Climate Change Risk Assessments (CCRA3, CCRA4), ensuring that the latest understanding from km-scale climate modelling feeds into decision-making. She has given many invited talks (e.g. at AGU, EGU, international workshops and Royal Society meetings) and has considerable experience of communicating with the media including television interviews (for Panorama, BBC News, live on Channel 4), radio interviews and podcasts, as well as dealing with ad-hoc press requests and writing policy briefs.

Prior to joining the Met Office, Lizzie did a PhD at Imperial College London using observational data to study the variability of atmospheric water vapour. During this time, she was lucky enough to have the opportunity of combining meteorological research with the ascent of an 8000 m Himalayan Peak, Cho Oyu. Before moving into climate research, Lizzie spent a few years working as a Radiological Analyst. As an undergraduate Lizzie studied Natural Sciences (Physics) at Cambridge University (1998) and also has an MSc in Pollution and Environmental Control from Manchester University (1999).