Dr Peter Watson
MPhys, DPhil
Current positions
Senior Research Fellow and Proleptic Senior Lecturer
School of Geographical Sciences
Contact
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Research interests
The main focus of my work is understanding the risks posed to society by extreme climate events and how these are being affected by climate change. I am part of the Climate Dynamics group, and this provides a vibrant environment for students and early career researchers.
One particular area of research is producing, verifying and applying physically-based simulations of the atmosphere or climate and 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). I have led the scientific development of a relatively high-resolution global atmospheric model to use in that system.
I also work on applying AI and machine learning methods to improve our climate predictions, through improving our climate simulators and post-processing of their output, thinking particularly about extreme weather. I was a Turing Fellow between 2021-3.
My past work has included fundamental large-scale atmospheric dynamics and improving climate model parameterisations, in particular studying the effects of stochastic parameterisation. My degree is in Physics.
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 students' and researchers' mental health - see for example this presentation (with slides here). I am a university Mental Health Champion.
Projects and supervisions
Research projects
ArctiCONNECT Consequences of Arctic Warming for European Climate and Extreme Weather
Role
Co-Investigator
Managing organisational unit
School of Geographical SciencesDates
02/11/2020 to 02/10/2023
ExSamples (Extreme Samples of Weather)
Role
Co-Investigator
Managing organisational unit
School of Geographical SciencesDates
01/07/2020 to 30/06/2021
The Future of Extreme European Winter Weather
Principal Investigator
Managing organisational unit
School of Geographical SciencesDates
01/01/2020 to 31/12/2024
Publications
Recent publications
16/04/2024Machine learning-based emulation of a km-scale UK climate model
Response of winter climate and extreme weather to projected Arctic sea-ice loss in very large-ensemble climate model simulations
npj Climate and Atmospheric Science
Machine learning applications for weather and climate predictions need greater focus on extremes: 2023 update
NeurIPS 2023 Workshop: Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning
Downscaling with a machine learning-based emulator of a local-scale UK climate model
Change in cooling degree days with global mean temperature rise increasing from 1.5 °C to 2.0 °C
Nature Sustainability