Dr Pete Falloon
Pete manages a team of scientists who work with and develop integrated models for assessing climate change impacts. The team focuses particularly on climate change agriculture and water resources.
Areas of expertise
- Soils (particularly carbon and nitrogen cycling)
- Ecosystems
- Agriculture (particularly greenhouse gas fluxes and land management)
- Water resources
Current activities
Pete leads the Climate Impacts Modelling (CIM) group, a group of four scientists working on agriculture, water resources, and their interactions with the changing climate.
Pete's own interests include soil (especially carbon), water, agriculture, land use and climate interactions. Much of the team's work uses the Joint UK Land Environment Simulator (JULES), which means that developments made in JULES can be built into the global Earth Systems Models such as UKESM.
Current projects include:
- Climate Science For Services Partnership Brazil (CSSP Brazil)
- IMPREX: IMproving PRedictions and management of hydrological EXtremes
Recent projects which Pete has been involved in include:
- The Inter-Sectoral Impact Model Intercomparison Project, led by PIK (2012-present)
- European Provision Of Regional Impacts Assessments on Seasonal and Decadal Timescales, led by the Met Office (2012-2017)
- NERC Hydrology-phosphorus interactions under changing climate and land-use: overcoming uncertainties and challenges for prediction to 2050 (NUTCAT-2050) project (Changing Water Cycles programme), led by the University of Lancaster (2013-2017).
- National Institute for Health Research Health Protection Research Unit (NIHR HPRU) in Environmental Change and Health (2014-2016)
- Nexus Network Think Piece "Systems thinking in environment-people science (STEPS)" (2014)
Career background
Dr Pete has nearly 20 years of experience in modelling environmental systems. He has a BSc (Hons) in Environmental Science of the Earth and Atmosphere from the University of Reading, and worked on modelling pesticide fate in riverine systems during an MSc (Research) and part-time lectureship the University of Greenwich. Pete moved to Rothamsted Research in 1996, where he worked on modelling soil, climate and vegetation interactions for 8 years and was awarded a PhD from the University of Nottingham in 2001.
He has written numerous peer-reviewed papers and book chapters on soil carbon dynamics, land use change and the impacts of climate change, and given many invited and offered presentations both in the UK and internationally.
Pete has been working on the impacts of climate and land use change on agriculture, soils and water at the Met Office Hadley Centre since 2004. He spent six months on secondment to the Communications Team as Climate Science Advisor in 2007/8.
External recognition
- ISRN Soil Science Editorial Board
- The Open Agriculture Journal editorial board
- Journal of Geology and Geosciences editorial board
- The Scientific World Journal Editorial Board (soil science)
- ISRN Atmospheric Sciences journal editorial board
- ISRN Meteorology journal editorial board
- World Agriculture editorial board
- Frontiers in Interdisciplinary Climate Studies editorial board - associate editor
- Has written, or contributed to 71 scientific papers (23 first author), and 11 book chapters in environmental science.
For more information, see Pete Falloon's linked in profile and ResearchGate profile.