What I do

Research interests

• Ocean heat uptake: how it comes about in AOGCMs, why their results differ, what we can deduce from observations of change in the ocean interior.
• Sea-level change: processes of change in AOGCMs, causes of its simulated regional distribution, comparison of simulated change and variability with tide gauges and altimetry. I am the PI of project "Seachange", funded by an Advanced Grant of the European Research Council to carry out research on sea-level change due to ocean density and circulation change.
• Climate sensitivity: how to diagnose it, its dependence on climate and forcing, its usefulness and limitations.
• Geographical patterns of climate change: how they are determined.
• Development of the FAMOUS Earth system model. Robin Smith is the manager of FAMOUS.
• Glacial-interglacial cycles: the mechanisms for these large changes of global land ice cover, atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration and climate. I am the PI of a project funded by a NERC standard grant on modelling the last glacial cycle with FAMOUS coupled to the Glimmer ice-sheet model. Tony Payne of the University of Bristol is a co-investigator and Robin Smith a research co-investigator.
• Modelling future changes in ice sheets and their contribution to sea-level change. I am the co-investigator, with Tony Payne of the University of Bristol, of a project of the Joint Weather and Climate Research Programme of NERC and the Met Office on ice-sheet/ice-shelf modelling. I am deputy leader of the workpackage on regional climate modelling over the ice-sheets in the EU Framework 7 project ice2sea.
• Climate change and the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation: I was the PI for the recently concluded (April 2011) UK model THC intercomparison project of the NERC RAPID programme.
• MEP: the hypothesis, first advanced by Paltridge, that the climate system behaves so as to maximise the production of entropy. I supervised Salvatore Pascale in his PhD work on this subject.

IT interests

• One of the authors of the CF metadata convention for climate data, which has been adopted as the standard for several climate centres and international projects. I am a member of the CF conventions and standard name committees and its governance panel.
• Development of IDL software for climate data analysis and display.

Organisational responsibilities

• Lead author for the sea-level chapter of the IPCC WG1 Fifth Assessment Report (due to be published in 2013).
• Supervisor for
  • Robin Smith, who is a research fellow, the manager of the FAMOUS model, and the research CoI of the project on the last glacial cycle.
  • Till Kuhlbrodt, who is a research fellow working on the "Seachange" project. Until February 2010 he held a Marie Curie research fellowship to work on wind-driven and eddy circulation in the Southern Ocean.
  • Nathaelle Bouttes, who is a research fellow working on the "Seachange" project.
  • David Hassell, who is a computational scientist working on the "Seachange" project.
• Member of the Climate Science Management Committee of the Met Office Hadley Centre.
• Member of the Scientific Steering Group of the Joint Weather and Climate Research Programme (JWCRP), for both NERC and the Met Office.