Climatologies

My ambition when investigating the climatological behaviours of weather systems is to apply my dynamical knowledge gained from diagnoses of individual weather system cases to categorize weather systems. This enables climatological information to be associated with forecast skill, an association necessary to assess future climate predictions. Highlights of the papers published by my research group are now given. We proved that the spectrum of extratropical cyclones in an objectively defined climatology was consistent with a proposed three-fold classification of extratropical cyclones and determined the prevalence and characteristics of the cyclone types (Plant et al., 2003; Gray and Dacre, 2006). We produced the first objective climatology of polar lows in the Nordic (Norwegian and Barents) seas and categorized the polar lows by dynamical forcing mechanism the revealing different behaviours of polar lows forming in the north and south of the Nordic seas (Bracegirdle and Gray, 2008). Finally, our categorization of the large-scale (synoptic) environments associated with mesoscale convective systems (amalgamations of thunderstorms) over the UK formally identified two new favourable environments in addition to the classical Spanish Plume environment (Lewis and Gray, 2010).