My research interests are very broad ranging from methods to reconstruct past climate from proxy records, such as tree rings, and instrumental data, through to modelling future climate. At the heart of my research is the quantitative analysis of models and observations of climate change in order to constrain the future. I’m also interested in extreme climate events and their causes.

My current research has been about extreme events largely in China where with CSSP funding I have been investigating the ability of climate models to simulate extreme events that are relevent to society. This has largely focused on extreme temperatures both “dry bulb” and “wet bulb” in China. I have also led a series of workshop with Chinese and Brizillian scientists where we carried out event attribution studies to see how how much human influences had affected observed observed extreme events. As expected we found large increases in the probability of extreme temperature events. Surprisingly we found significant changes in the probability of hydrological extremes.

I also am interested in the use of optimsation methods applied to climate models to constrain future climate change and currently have a student working on Machine Learning for convective parmaeterisation.