An external view of the Met Office building at night.

Chris Kent

Areas of expertise

  • Assessment of unprecedented extreme events: UNSEEN (UNprecedented Simulation of Extremes with ENsembles)
  • Food security, climate variability and change
  • Analysing Environmental Operating Limits (EOLs) under a changing climate
  • Ocean colour remote sensing

Email [email protected]

Publications by Chris Kent

Current activities

Chris currently undertakes scientific research to enhance the Met Office’s capability and reputation in the field of global climate dynamics and improve the quality of its climate predictions and services to customers. Current activities include investigating the present-day risk of extreme rainfall and developing new methods to characterise model skill across different time scales within the Met Office’s seasonal prediction system.

Career background

Chris joined the Met Office in August 2012 as part of the Climate Consultancy Development Team. In August 2013 Chris joined the Climate Security Team working on projects analysing the interactions between the climate and human systems. Research topics included the risk of unprecedented adverse growing conditions for crop production, assessment of food price shocks on commodities important to the UK due to extreme weather, providing climate science information to the UK Ministry of Defence and analysing model uncertainty in CMIP5 projections for tropical precipitation. Chris joined the Monthly-to-Decadal Variability and Predictability group in April 2019.

Before joining the Met Office Chris obtained a first class BSc (Hons) degree in Ocean Science from Plymouth University. He then worked on satellite oceanography for over four years at ARGANS Ltd in Plymouth, UK, working within the MERIS Quality Working Group (MQWG) and the MERIS Validation Team (MVT), and developing the DIMITRI software for radiometric inter-calibration of optical satellite sensors.