An external view of the Met Office building at night.
Climate and climate change

Tim Legg

Areas of expertise

  • UK weather and climate.

  • Surface observations.

  • Data analysis and statistics.

  • Numerical weather prediction.

  • Computer programming.

My Publications - Legg, T

Current activities

The NCIC monitors the UK land-surface climate and is responsible for the provision of monthly, seasonal and annual summaries for the UK and its constituent regions. Noteworthy weather affecting the UK (such as floods, gales and heatwaves) is studied and placed into context against historical records. Tim supported the UK Climate Projections project (UKCP09), by producing datasets of derived statistics (e.g. heaviest 10-day rainfall amounts) for the UK 5 km by 5 km grid.

Another important aspect of Tim's work was a comparison of readings from various meteorological instruments in connection with the roll-out of the Meteorological Monitoring System (MMS), which is the surface automatic weather-station network.  This is of underpinning importance to the work of NCIC as our data-series are ultimately based on station observations.  More recently a major focus of Tim's work has been in the digitisation of additional historical station data of daily/monthly temperature and rainfall readings, so that our historical gridded series can be extended back further to assist in the historical monitoring of drought episodes and other climatic variations.

Tim maintains and develops the historical long-term data-sets of CET and HadUKP. He also assists with answering climate enquiries, and in producing the regular UK weather summaries each month.

Career background

Tim graduated from the University of Reading in 1984 with a degree in Physics and Meteorology and joined the Met Office that same year. He worked in the Synoptic Climatology branch, which included experimental monthly forecasting as well as analysis of historical climatological series. Over the years he moved towards shorter-range forecasting research, including pioneering work with ensembles. Then, in 2008, he moved back into the field of climatology.