An external view of the Met Office building at night.

Nick Rayner

Areas of expertise

  • Sea surface temperature observations.

  • Sea-ice observations.

  • Marine air temperature observations.

  • Ocean temperature observations.

  • Global surface temperature observations.

  • Statistical reconstruction of historical climate data.

My Publications - Rayner, N

Current activities

Nick is responsible for the leadership and management of people in the Climate Monitoring and Attribution group who develop observed climate data sets and use them to monitor the current state of the climate and evaluate climate models. The team produces homogeneous records of climate variability and change by comparing observations made in different ways and developing adjustments to make them comparable.

Nick is a member of:

Career background

Nick joined the Met Office Hadley Centre in 1993. She was responsible for developing sea-surface temperature and sea ice data sets which have been widely used internationally.  

With her research team, Nick has created global, multi-decadal and centennial data sets of surface and sub-surface ocean temperature and salinity, sea ice and global surface temperature.  

She has used her understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of climate data to contribute to European collaborations on satellite data set development, dynamical reanalysis development and to coordinate the innovative EUSTACE EU Horizon 2020 project. This latter project uniquely integrated satellite and station measurements to create information on daily variability and extremes in surface air temperature over the whole globe.

External recognition

L G Groves memorial prize for Meteorological Observation in 2018