An external view of the Met Office building at night.

Julian Heming

Areas of expertise

  • Tropical cyclone initialisation in the Unified Model.
  • Development of tropical weather diagnostics
  • Verification of tropical cyclone forecasts.

Publications by Julian Heming

Current activities

Julian works on all aspects of tropical cyclone prediction in the short period (0-7 days). This includes initialisation of tropical cyclones in the Unified Model, product generation and dissemination,  verification of forecasts and maintaining the metofficestorms Twitter feed.

Although primarily focused on short period tropical cyclone prediction himself, Julian also helps co-ordinate tropical cyclone research and forecasting activities across other timescales being undertaken at the Met Office. This includes ensemble predictions from MOGREPS, seasonal predictions of Atlantic tropical cyclone activity from the Met Office seasonal prediction system (GloSea) and climate model predictions of tropical cyclone activity. His work also involves collaboration with scientists working in the field of tropical meteorology around the world and he is the Met Office's prime contact with all the regional tropical cyclone forecasting centres.

Career background

Having gained a degree in Physics and Meteorology at Reading University Julian joined the Met Office in 1988, initially working on the impact of observations on numerical weather prediction. He has also worked in areas such as model diagnostic development, the forecast suite control system, intervention in model predictions and diagnosis of model errors. However, the majority of his work has been in the field of tropical prediction.

In the early 1990s Julian started examining the Met Office global model's capabilities in tropical cyclone forecasting. This culminated in him developing a new tropical cyclone initialisation scheme which improved the Met Office global model's forecast tracks by 30%. Since then he has worked as the Met Office's tropical cyclone specialist dealing with a diverse range of matters from model development to forecast verification and advisory production to media briefings.