An external view of the Met Office building at night.

Michael Sanderson

Michael works on projects for numerous customers with a particular interest in climate impacts on agriculture, infrastructure and health.

Areas of expertise

  • Climate change
  • Climate impacts
  • Science communication
  • Climate and agriculture

Publications by Michael Sanderson

Current activities

Michael undertakes a range of projects for various customers. He is currently leading a work package for the MED-GOLD project, whose aim is to assess observations, seasonal forecasts and climate projections and recommend the best datasets for use within the project.

He led some of the work for a project "Characterising natural hazards for UK energy infrastructure". This project was commissioned by the Energy Technologies Institute (ETI) and led by EDF's UK R&D Centre, with the Met Office and Mott Macdonald as consortium partners. AIR Worldwide, HR Wallingford and Verisk Climate were also involved in earlier phases. He led work on lightning, which included developing extreme lightning scenarios, hazard combinations, and contributed to the study on large hailstones. A series of technical guidance documents which were accompanied by a series of case studies were produced. The documents are now being hosted online by the Institution of Chemical Engineers and Institution of Mechanical Engineers and are freely available.

 

Career background

Michael has been a member of Applied Science since 2007. He originally joined the Met Office in 2000, in the Atmospheric Chemistry group, where he worked on the STOCHEM chemistry model and used it to perform simulations of global and regional impacts of various policies ands study intercontinental transport of pollutants. He contributed results to the ACCENT and TF HTAP model intercomparison projects, which studied the impacts of climate change on ozone levels and the deposition of various pollutants to the ground, and intercontinental transport of pollutants.

Prior to joining the Met Office, Michael was a post-doctoral researcher at Cambridge University, where he initially studied global methane emissions and sinks, and then helped develop a lightweight ozone monitor based on a gas sensitive resistor. He completed a PhD in Atmospheric Chemistry at the University of York, where he also received his undergraduate degree.

Michael has a keen interest in science communication. He has given many presentations on climate change, to various institutions and members of the public, including the evidence for a changing climate and attribution of those changes.