An external view of the Met Office building at night.

Dr Mark McCarthy

Areas of expertise

  • Climate Monitoring
  • UK Climate
  • Urban climate
  • Regional climate prediction
  • Land surface modelling

My Publications - McCarthy, M

Current activities

Mark's work is to lead the NCIC team to provide underpinning observational data and analysis of UK climate. The purpose of the group is to help government, public, and commercial customers by providing an authoritative source of UK climatological data products, enable the UK to understand the climatological context of weather and climate events as they happen, and to enable society to better understand and manage risks and opportunities arising from climate variability and change.

A key aspect of this work is in the development of UK climate UKCP09: Gridded observation data sets and UK climate derived from land surface station records. These data are then used for the analysis of UK climate trends and to develop improved understanding of the key drivers of variability and change, drawing on expertise from the wider climate research community. Current interests include analysis of a recent sequence of wet summers in the UK.

Mark's work also involves collaboration with the hydrological community to provide improved cross-agency hydro-meteorological monitoring products for the UK. Mark is also involved in the activities of the EUMETNET climate programme led by KNMI in the Netherlands.

Career background

Mark joined the Met Office Hadley Centre in 1999, where he spent the first 7 years years of his career working in the Climate Monitoring and Attribution team studying observational records of the variability and change in atmospheric water vapour. In that time he also completed a PhD at Imperial College London on the same topic. He then moved to the Climate impacts group to research urban climate impacts, specifically understanding how regional and global climate change are expressed through the urban heat island. He has been actively involved in a wide range of projects from the Amazon to the Indian monsoon utilising developments in the land surface scheme within regional and global climate models. Mark returned to climate monitoring and attribution team in October 2012.