Simon Vosper - Aegis Professor of Weather and Climate Science

Simon is the Aegis Professor of Weather and Climate Science and Executive Director of Science at the Met Office.

As Director of Science at the Met Office, Simon is a member of the Executive leadership team which is responsible for the development and implementation of Met Office Corporate and Research and Innovation strategies. Simon is also responsible for the delivery of the Met Office science programme, and the scientific capabilities enabled by their current and future supercomputing capability. 

He leads the Science Directorate, a team of approximately 550 scientists and scientific software engineers, whose pioneering research and development represents the core of Met Office weather and climate science. Alongside this, Simon leads the Met Office Next Generation Modelling Systems and National Capability AI programmes, two major R&D programmes which are transforming the Met Office’s weather and climate modelling capabilities, enabling us to exploit future generations of supercomputers and remain at the forefront of weather and climate science and services. 

The Met Office is a key component of the UK science landscape. They work closely with the academic sector, other Public Sector Research Establishments and industrial partners to advance weather and climate science and, crucially, to implement scientific and technical advances to improve products and services. Met Office scientists work closely with academic researchers within the Met Office Academic Partnership (MOAP) of which the University of Bristol is a key partner. Simon plays a key role in shaping the MOAP relationship, including identifying new opportunities for strategic initiatives.

Simon also oversees the career development of Met Office scientists and software engineers. Graduate and PhD students are key part of the talent pool for the Met Office and he has co-supervised and mentored many PhD students over the years. Many of his students have gone on to either join the Met Office, or forged successful careers in academia and other research institutes.

Prior to joining the Met Office in 2001, Simon was based at the University of Leeds (including stints at the University of Surrey) as a postdoctoral research fellow, latterly funded by the NERC postdoctoral fellowship scheme. He completed a PhD on the behaviour of orographic internal gravity waves at the Department of Applied Mathematical Studies, University of Leeds in 1995. Following this, Simon worked as a postdoctoral research fellow on a number of projects at the School of Earth and Environment at the University of Leeds and at the University of Surrey. His experience includes participation in and coordination of field measurement programmes, fluid dynamical laboratory experiments and numerical modelling.

Simon's scientific expertise is in orographic processes (the interaction of air flow with hills and mountains), and he has pioneered scientific understanding and the development of new representations of these processes in modelling systems and forecast tools. He has overseen the development of major upgrades to the Met Office Unified Model, including the Global Atmosphere and Regional Atmosphere seamless science configurations which are used in both weather and climate application, with personal contributions including improvements to the dynamical core and the orographic drag parametrization schemes.