If you think I'm going to say anything about my personal life on a medium read by every nutcase from Berkshire to Brisbane, you must be crazy yourself. This web page confines itself to work.

**gasoline: n, a volatile flammable mixture of hydrocarbons (hexane and heptane and octane etc.) derived from petroleum; used mainly as a fuel in internal-combustion engines [syn: gasolene, gas, petrol])

Here are my promised curry recipes

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This is what I get paid to do:

I work in NCAS Climate@Reading. I'm in the Climate Change group.

I'm the project manager of the QUEST project's earth system model QESM.

Here's a link to the QESM wiki page (password required to enter)

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The following things are what I used to get paid to do- I still do research on these topics:

Climate modelling
I used to be a research scientist at the Hadley Centre for Climate Change, doing earth system science and climate model development, from carbon cycle modelling to coupled-ocean atmosphere processes in the tropics, to looking at mechanisms behind land surface temperature feedbacks under climate change, and climatic effects of volcanic eruptions.

Coupled Ocean-Atmosphere Processes in the North Atlantic Region
I've coupled a simplified high-resolution (1/6° - 1/12°) shallow-water ocean model of the Atlantic Ocean to the IGCM in order to investigate the North Atlantic storm track, as well as the potential changes in the thermohaline circulation. The advantages of this approach is that it allows the representation of small-scale features like ocean Kelvin waves and the Gulfstream, but is not as computationally intensive as running state-of-the-art coupled multilayer global ocean models.

Water vapour in the stratosphere
I'm looking at how volcanic eruptions change water vapour transport. It's known that volcanic eruptions act to dry out the upper troposphere, but the effect on the lower stratosphere might be to make it wetter. Volcanic eruptions could explain a significant part of the observed increase in stratospheric water vapour concentrations since 1960. I'm also looking at the dynamical effects of stratospheric water vapour changes.

Refining metrics of climate change
Radiative forcing is an example of such a metric (or measure) that is utilised in the Kyoto Protocol. However, as a measure of climate change, it has its flaws, so we're trying to find improved metrics of global warming related to radiative forcing. The METRIC project website explains more. Click on the publications link at the bottom of this webpage for references to papers that the METRIC team have produced.

Terrestrial planetary atmospheres
A lot of my career has been spent researching the circulation and evolution of the Martian (and Venusian) atmospheres. Before coming to Reading I spent 4 years working in this group. And before that I did a PhD at this place.

Extrasolar planets
This research is about modelling the atmospheres of planets that nobody has actually found yet! I know this sounds quite dodgy but there is a reason. Astronomers tend to concentrate searches for planets around G-type stars like the sun, rather than smaller M-stars (commonly called red dwarf stars), even though M stars constitute 80% of all main sequence stars. Some of the reasons for this are unavoidable given limitations in technology. However, other reasons for this bias are based on assumptions about the nature of the geophysics of planets orbiting M stars which may be flawed. The modelling work aimed to highlight such flaws.

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And finally, obligatory self-publicity:

Here are some of my publications

An article about the extrasolar planet research appeared in New Scientist in 2001. Read it here.

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