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Cambridge Forum for Sustainability and the Environment

 

Biography

As Chief Scientist, Julia is responsible for providing scientific and technical strategy; ensuring the organisation adheres to good scientific and technical standards, and directing and managing research and development with the Met Office. She also represents the office, on science and technology, across government.

She became Met Office Chief Scientist in February 2009. Before joining the Met Office she was the Director of Climate Research in NERC's National Centre for Atmospheric Science, at the University of Reading, where she is still a Professor of Meteorology. In 2006 she founded the Walker Institute for Climate System Research at Reading, aimed at addressing the cross disciplinary challenges of climate change and its impacts.

Julia has had a long-term career in climate modelling and research, working at the Met Office, ECMWF and NCAR in the USA. Her personal research addresses problems in tropical climate variability - its influence on the global climate; its role in seasonal to decadal climate prediction, and its response to climate change. Increasingly Julia's research considers the multi-disciplinary aspects of the impacts of climate variability and change on crops and water resources, and the need to improve the representation of weather systems and rainfall distributions in climate prediction models. She has successfully promoted the use of much higher resolution in climate models, required to capture these important processes and phenomena, and this has meant working with some of the world's largest supercomputers, such as the Earth Simulator in Japan.

Chief Scientist at the Met Office
Visiting Professor at the Department of Meteorology, University of Reading
Professor Dame Julia  Slingo
Not available for consultancy

Affiliations

Person keywords: 
climate change and its impacts
climate modelling
monsoons of India and China, as well as El Niño
tropical weather and climate