Dr William Roberts

Research summary

I have a number of interests that broadly come under the description of using models to try and understand how the climate works.

I'm currently very interested in the changing climate of the tropical Pacific, on all timescales from interannual variability, or El Niño, to changes over many thousands of years. I have developed tools to try and understand how El Niño may react to long term changes in the background state and am applying these to investigate changes in the past and the future.

Moving towards the polar regions I am also interested in exactly what Heinrich Events ...

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Biography

I studied Physics and Meteorology at the University of Reading, UK, before heading west to do a PhD in the Atmospheric Science department at the University of Washington, Seattle, USA. I wrote my dissertation on  El Nino variability during the early Holocene. I then worked in "The City" and as a corporate social responsibility consultant before finally figuring out that climate research was what I actually wanted to do. 

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Links

•   homepage

Recent publications

• Lo, YTE, Mitchell, DM, Gasparrini, A, Vicedo-Cabrera, A, Ebi, KL, Frumhoff, P, Millar, RJ, Roberts, W, Sera, F, Sparrow, S, Uhe, P & Williams, G, 2019, ‘Increasing mitigation ambition to meet the Paris Agreement’s temperature goal avoids substantial heat-related mortality in U.S. cities’. Science Advances, vol 5.
• Jones, TR, Roberts, WH, Steig, EJ, Cuffey, KM, Markle, BR & White, JW, 2018, ‘Southern Hemisphere climate variability forced by Northern Hemisphere ice-sheet topography’. Nature, vol 554., pp. 351-355

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View complete publications list in the University of Bristol publications system