An external view of the Met Office building at night.

Dr Tim Johns

Areas of expertise

  • Climate model development and evaluation.

  • Climate model experimental design and forcing.

  • Anthropogenic climate change scenarios.

  • The hydrological cycle (water cycle).

  • Software engineering.

Publications by Tim Johns

Current activities

In addition to managing the Global coupled modelling team, Tim is currently working on analysis of multi-model climate change experiments completed in the European Union ENSEMBLES project, which included simulations with two versions of the Unified Model. He is interested in understanding and reducing modelling uncertainties in projected warming and water cycle changes over the next century on global to continental scales, including the role of aerosols. Tim has a broad interest in scientific and technical aspects of global climate modelling. Tim is jointly responsible for leading the Met Office's project and aims to facilitate joined-up research across the Met Office and with external scientific activities in this field, including partnerships with the Changing Water Cycle programme.

Career background

Tim joined the Met Office in 1986, and has spent his Met Office career working on climate research and climate model development. He played a significant role in the original design and implementation of the Unified Model system, and in the subsequent development and operational introduction of the HadCM2, HadCM3, HadGEM1 and HadGEM2 climate models.

Before 1986, he was a post-doctoral researcher at University College Cardiff, where he gained his PhD in 1984, working on code development and numerical simulation of galactic dynamics. In that work he designed and programmed a galaxy model code that ran on the world's first commercial massively parallel supercomputer, the ICL Distributed Array Processor. Tim completed Part III of the Maths Tripos at the University of Cambridge in 1980, specialising in astrophysics and relativity theory, having previously graduated in Mathematics from the University of Southampton in 1979.

External recognition

  • Tim was jointly awarded the Norbert Gerbier-MUMM International Award by the two years in succession, in 1997 and 1998. The purpose of the Norbert Gerbier-MUMM International Award is to encourage and reward annually an original scientific paper on the influence of meteorology in a particular field of the physical, natural or human sciences, or on the influence of one of these sciences on meteorology. It aims to stimulate interest in such research, in support of programmes.

  • Tim was jointly awarded the Environmental Research Laboratories Outstanding Scientific Paper Award by the US Department of Commerce, in 1997.