An external view of the Met Office building at night.

Bernd Becker

Bernd works on developing products from monthly and seasonal ensemble forecasts.

Areas of expertise

  • Ensemble prediction.

  • Long-range forecasting.

  • Large-scale synoptic weather types.

  • Tropical cyclone forecasts.

  • Weather hazard prediction.

Publications by Bernd Becker

Current activities

Bernd is a senior scientist working on products derived from long-range ensemble predictions. He has developed and implemented the post-processing of the ECMWF extended EPS to deliver the UK monthly outlook for the BBC web page and DeciderTM. Bernd has also developed the post-processing suite for the Met Office seasonal tropical cyclone forecast.

The current focus of Bernd's work is to devise threshold exceedance probability products describing weather hazard from long-range ensemble forecasts. If successful, these forecasts may be used in hazard prediction and warning systems. Long-range flood forecasting products are being developed for the northeast of the UK in close collaboration with the Environment Agency.

Bernd is currently working on increasing the resilience of some operational applications.

Career background

Bernd has a long and interesting career in meteorology. After receiving his Diplom in Meteorologie from the University of Hamburg in 1991 he worked at the Max-Planck-Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg with Prof. Herterich on the LSG ocean model developed by Ernst Meier-Reimer for the Project "Global Changes over the last 30,000 years".

In 1992 he became a consultant for the ESA at ECMWF to conduct Doppler wind lidar and other satellite observing system simulation experiments. There he worked with Ad Stoffelen, John Eyre, Roger Saunders, Philippe Courtier and Anthony Hollingsworth. Later, Bernd collaborated on PROVOST with Tim Palmer and the re-analysis team at ECMWF.

In 1997 Bernd joined the CGAM, now NCAS at the University of Reading, in the Tropical and Monsoon Research team lead by Prof. Julia Slingo. There he worked on the EU funded projects PRISM, SHIVA, and SINTEX.

In 2000 Bernd started at the Met Office and became a scientist in the monthly to seasonal forecasting team led by Richard Graham. Since then Bernd has developed:

  • the monthly forecast system to deliver commercial forecasting products operationally,

  •  the seasonal tropical cyclone forecast suite,

  • operational heat stress forecast products for the Ministry of Defence,

and has worked on consultancy projects for oil exploration in Arctic regions.