Dr Peter A G Watson

The main focus of my work is understanding the risks posed to society by extreme climatic events and how these are being affected by climate change. In particular, I work on producing, verifying and applying physically-based simulations of the atmosphere or climate and focus on understanding extreme atmospheric weather systems. One of my partnerships is with climateprediction.net, who use distributed computing to produce very large simulation datasets containing thousands of examples of possible weather systems, facilitating the study of extremes (you can even volunteer your own computer's time for this, if you would like). Past work of mine has included leading the scientific development of a high-resolution atmospheric model (by CMIP6 standards) to use in that system. I also aim to improve our climate simulators and post-processing of their output by using machine learning approaches.

My past work has included fundamental large-scale atmospheric dynamics and improving climate model parameterisations, in particular studying the effects of stochastic parameterisation.

I am also very interested in improving the ways that science is done and our working environment - a particular topic of interest at present is finding ways to improve researchers' mental health - see for example this presentation.