An external view of the Met Office building at night.

Dr Gareth S Jones

Gareth's main research activity is in the detection of past climate change and the attribution of possible causes.

Areas of expertise

  • Statistical analysis of climate datasets

  • Historical anthropogenic influences on climate

  • Solar and volcanic influences on climate

  • Running and monitoring climate model simulations

  • Climate science communication

My Publications - Jones, G.S.

Current activities

Gareth is a senior scientist and part of a team working on Attribution of observed changes to causes. His main research involves using sophisticated statistical tools to compare observed datasets with the output from climate model simulations. This type of analysis can be used to try to tell whether a change in the climate has occurred and to distinguish what the different contributions to the change can be.

There are a number of different research areas that Gareth is currently involved with. As part of the delivery of data from climate simulations for the IPCC 5th assessment report, Gareth is contributing to the running and monitoring of historic climate model simulations for the purposes of detection and attribution studies. Gareth is also researching how various types of uncertainty influence detection and attribution studies, such as uncertainties in observations, models and influencing factors.

How much the Sun has influenced past climate changes and its potential to influence future changes is an area that has sometimes proven to be controversial. Gareth is involved in research with colleagues at theUniversity of Reading Department of Meteorology examining the potential to learn more about how much the Sun has and can influence climate.

Other research highlights include leading studies on the impact of a volcanic super-eruption on climate, the detection and attribution of changes in northern hemisphere summer temperatures, and investigating how much black carbon aerosol emissions have contributed to recent changes in observed temperatures. He was involved in producing climate model simulation data for the IPCC third and fourth assessment reports.

Career background

Gareth joined the detection and attribution team in the Met Office Hadley Centre in 1997. Prior to joining the Met Office Hadley Centre he earned his PhD in general relativity data analysis at Cardiff University and was a post-doc at Cardiff and briefly at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Potsdam. Gareth obtained his Physics degree at Birmingham University.