An external view of the Met Office building at night.

Dr Malcolm Roberts

Malcolm leads a team working on developing and analysing higher resolution versions of Met Office global coupled climate models across space and time scales.

Areas of expertise

  • Developing higher resolution climate models.
  • Assessing impact of horizontal resolution on model characteristics.
  • Simulation of tropical cyclones by climate models

Publications by M Roberts

Current activities

Malcolm's work aims to develop a hierarchy of resolutions of the current global coupled climate model, in collaboration with the NERC academic community as part of the Joint Weather and Climate Research Programme (Met Office) (NERC JWCRP). This enables the study of the impact of improving the representation of processes at higher resolution on the model's mean state, variability and extremes.This has evolved into an international effort to study the impact of model resolution in a multi-model context as part of the WRCP CMIP6 HighResMIP protocol, with the main European contribution as part of Horizon 2020 PRIMAVERA project.

This work builds on previous exploration of model resolution with a previous version of the climate model, done in collaboration with the NERC community as part of the High Resolution Climate Modelling (HRCM) group, and together with NERC and the Earth Simulator Center in Japan as the UK-Japan Climate Collaboration.

Career background

Malcolm joined the Met Office Hadley Centre in 1991, and has spent most of his time since then working within the Ocean and Ice Model Development area. During that time he completed a PhD at the University of Reading on studying the effects of including small-scale ocean eddies within ocean models, and how these might be represented in lower resolution models. He now leads the High Resolution Global Climate Modelling group, which studies the effects of model resolution in the coupled atmosphere/ocean/sea-ice system.

External recognition