An external view of the Met Office building at night.

Dr Robert Dunn

Robert is developing datasets in order to study climate extremes.

Areas of expertise

  • Data quality control and processing pipelines

  • Sub daily datasets

  • Climate extremes

Publications by Robert Dunn

Current activities   

Robert is the lead developer of the HadISD dataset. This is a sub-daily dataset comprising the major meteorological observations since 1931 for over 8000 surface stations across the globe. An automated quality control routine ensures a high level of reproducibility, and the dataset has monthly appends with a larger update run annually. He has also been involved with the development of HadISDH, a gridded, monthly surface humidity dataset based on HadISD.

Robert has developed the HadEX3 dataset, a major update to a dataset of gridded climate extremes indices.  This has increased the spatio-temporal coverage over its predecessor (HadEX2) and included recent data so that the dataset covers 1901-2018.

For the past few years he has lead the editorial team of the Global Climate chapter of the BAMS State of the Climate report.  He also leads a work package in a Copernicus Climate Change Service on "Access to in-situ Observations", bringing together and harmonising in situ surface land and marine data to make them easier to use.

Career background

Robert joined the Met Office in 2010 in the Climate Monitoring and Attribution team. Before that he worked as a post-doc at the Excellence Cluster "Universe" in Munich studying the behaviour of solar-mass black-holes over time from their X-ray emission. He received his PhD from the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge, which followed on from an MSci in Natural Sciences (Physics) from Cambridge University.