An external view of the Met Office building at night.

Professor Peter Stott

Peter is a Science Fellow in Climate Attribution. He is an expert in the attribution of climate change to anthropogenic and natural causes.

Areas of expertise

  • Climate modelling of past and future climate.

  • Attribution of past changes to their natural and anthropogenic contributions.

  • Climate monitoring.

My Publications - Stott, P

Current activities

Peter is Science Fellow for Attribution. The research group he leads is investigating new methods for quantifying past changes in climate and is conducting research into the links between extreme weather events and human-induced emissions of greenhouse gases. The team is also developing an operational attribion system to calculate how recent extreme weather events have been affected by climate variability and change. 

His personal research interests include the development of attribution to regional scales and to the analysis of extremes and the use of past changes to infer observational constraints on future changes. He is interested in the development of operational systems for attributing the causes of extreme weather events in near-real time by calculating the odds of such events and how they have changed as a result of different factors. Better information of this sort can help to better inform adaptation strategies and help avoid "misattribution" whereby people can be over-eager to blame an extreme weather event on either climate change or natural weather fluctuations. An important component of future research will be incorporating better process understanding into attribution analyses.

He is a co-editor of the annual report in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society which explains previous extreme weather and climate events of the previous year from a climate perspective. He was the recipient of the Climate Science Communications Award for 2018 from the Royal Meteorological Society and was named by Foreign Policy Magazine as one of the world's leading Global Thinkers for 2013.

Peter also has a part time position at the University of Exeter where he is Professor in Detection and Attribution in the Mathematics department.

Career background

Peter joined the Met Office Hadley Centre in 1996 to work on detection and attribution of past climate change. During that time he wrote many scientific papers, often in collaboration with colleagues from other institutes, and was involved in the Third Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as a Contributing Author. In 2006 he became Manager of the Understanding and Attributing Climate Change team and in 2008 became the Head of the Climate Monitoring and Attribution group. From 2004 he was heavily involved in the production of the Fourth Assessment Report of the IPCC as a Lead Author for both the Working Group 1 report on the Physical Science Basis and the Synthesis Report, which in addition covers impacts, adaptation and mitigation. He was Coordinating Lead Author for Chapter 10 (Detection and attribution of climate change: from global to regional) of the Working Group 1 of IPCC Fifth Assessment Report (AR5).

He thinks it is important to communicate scientific findings about climate to the public and has given many media interviews, including on TV, radio and to many print journalists. He also appeared in documentaries for Channel 4 and National Geographic TV about Extreme Weather and Climate Change and has written articles for New Scientist, the Guardian and a Carbon Brief blog on recent floods.

Peter has a first degree in Mathematics from Durham University and completed Part III of the Mathematics Tripos at Cambridge University. The research for his PhD at Imperial College, London was atmospheric modelling of the environmental consequences of the Chernobyl nuclear accident. After that he carried out post-doctoral research at Edinburgh University on stratospheric ozone depletion.

Key papers include:

  • Stott, P. A., S. F. B. Tett, G. S. Jones, M. R. Allen, J. F. B. Mitchell, G. J. Jenkins., 2000. External control of twentieth century temperature change by natural and anthropogenic forcings. Science, 290, 2133-2137.

  • Stott, P. A., J. A. Kettleborough, 2002. Origins and estimates of uncertainty in predictions of twenty-first century temperature rise. Nature, 416, 723-726.

  • Stott, P. A., 2003. Attribution of regional scale temperature changes to anthropogenic and natural causes. Geophys. Res. Lett.., Vol. 30, doi 10.1029/2003GL017324.

  • Stott, P.A., D.A. Stone M. R. Allen, 2004: Human contribution to the European heat wave of 2003. Nature, 432, 610-614.

  • Christidis, N., P. A. Stott, S. Brown, G. C. Hegerl, and J. Caesar, 2005: Detection of change in temperature extremes during the second half of the twentieth century. Geophys. Res. Lett., 32, doi:10.1029/2005GL023885.

  • Stott, P. A., J. F. B. Mitchell, M. R. Allen, T. Delworth, J. M. Gregory, G. Meehl, and B. Santer, 2006: Observational constraints on past attributable warming and predictions of future global warming. J. Climate, 19, 3055-3069.

  • Stott, P. A., R. T. Sutton, D. M. Smith, 2008: Detection and attribution of Atlantic salinity changes. Geophys. Res. Lett., 35, doi:10.1029/2008GL035874.

  • Palmer, M. D., S. A. Good, K. Haines, N. A. Rayner, P. A. Stott, 2009: A new perspective on global warming of the oceans. Geophys. Res. Lett., 36, doi:10.1029/2009GL039491.

  • Stott, P. A., Jones, G. S., Christidis, N., Zwiers, F. W., Hegerl, G. C., Shiogama, H., 2011. Single-step attribution of increasing probability of very warm regional temperatures to human influence. Atmos. Sci. Lett.,12, 220-227 doi:10.1002/asl315.
  • Stott, P A., Allen, M., Christidis, N., Dole, R., Hoerling, M., Huntingford, C., Pall, P., Perlwitz, J., Stone, D., 2013. Attribution of Weather and Climate-Related Extreme Events. Position Paper for WCRP OSC. Accepted as part of monograph of position papers. In Monograph : "Climate Science for Serving Society: Research, Modelling and Prediction Priorities" published by Springer.
  • Stott, P. A., Good, P., Jones, G. S., Hawkins, E., 2013. Upper end of climate model temperature projections is inconsistent with past warming. Environ Res. Lett., 8, 014024, doi.10.1088/1748-9326/8/1/014024.

External recognition

  • Lead Author for Chapter 9, "Understanding and Attributing Climate Change", IPCC Working Group 1 (WG1) Fourth Assessment Report (AR4).

  • Member of Core Writing Team for IPCC AR4 Synthesis Report and Focal Point for the Synthesis Report Topic on Causes of Change.

  • Member of writing team on IPCC Good Practice Guidance Paper on Detection and Attribution Related to Anthropogenic Climate Change.

  • Contributed to the reports of the IPCC which was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007

  • Co-Recipient of the 2008 Oceanic and Atmospheric Research Outstanding Scientific Paper Award.

  • Lead-author paper on "Human contribution to the European heatwave of 2003" chosen by Nature as one of 10 highlighted papers they published in 2004.

  • Associate Editor Journal of Climate.

  • Chosen as one of the 100 Leading Global Thinkers of 2013 by Foreign Policy Magazine.
  • Coordinating Lead Author for Chapter 10, "Detection and Attribution of Climate Change: from Global to Regional", IPCC Working Group 1 (WG1) Fifth Assessment Report (AR5).
  • Recipient of the Climate Science Communications Prize of the Royal Meteorological Society for 2018.

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