Richard Jones

Areas of expertise

• Developing high quality globally applicable regional climate modelling systems
• Establishing reliable climate projections
• Interpretation of climate projections
• Climate scenario development
• Use of climate scenarios in assessing climate change impacts and adaptation
• Communicating climate science

Current activities

Managing the development and application of the new Met Office Hadley Centre regional climate model, HadGEM3-RA (the regional version of the new seasonal prediction and prototype global climate model HadGEM3), and its application in the WCRP Coordinated Regional Downscaling Experiment CORDEX, the DfID-funded Climate Science Research Programme, a project for Met Service Singapore and the EU-funded EUPORIAS project. HadGEM3-RA will be run over all land regions driven by quasi-observed boundary conditions to establish the quality of the model and at a range of high and very high resolutions to demonstrate its ability to capture detailed aspects of weather and climate. It will then be used to downscale strategically selected subsets of CMIP5 model projections and monthly to seasonal predictions over various regions.

Managing the development and dissemination of an ensemble downscaling version of the PRECIS regional climate modelling system and its deployment worldwide for constructing climate scenarios and applying them in assessing climate impacts and vulnerability.

Lead author of the Regional Context chapter (21) and the Summary for Policy Makers of the IPCC Working Group 2 contribution to Assessment Report Five focusing on Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability.

Providing scientific consultancy to climate resilience and climate adaptation projects in Asia and Africa.

Visiting Professor in the School of Geography and Environment, University of Oxford, involving coordinating Met Office Academic Partnership activities in climate services and African climate and collaborative research on generating regional climate information from large ensemble simulations and on model development.

Met Office focal point for the UNFCCC Nairobi Work Programme providing advice on climate projections, scenario development and application and downscaling relevant to climate change adaptation.

Career background

Richard has a PhD in mathematics, specifically in the analysis of numerical methods relevant to oil reservoir modelling, and immediately prior to joining the Hadley Centre was a postdoctoral researcher in the Mathematics Department at Oxford University. He joined the Hadley Centre in 1990 where he developed its regional climate modelling capability and has subsequently applied it in many innovative ways - developing a consistent GCM/RCM modelling system; for systematic domain-size experiments; to develop climate timescale simulations driven by numerical weather prediction analyses; to provide multi-decadal regional climate change projections; developing GCMs to provide high quality boundary conditions for RCMs; to provide ensemble detailed regional climate change Scenarios. He was a lead author of the regional climate information chapters of IPCC Assessment Reports Three (Chapter 10) and Four (Chapter 11). He led the development of the regional climate modelling system PRECIS and has worked with institutes across all continents in the fields of climate prediction and climate scenario development.