An external view of the Met Office building at night.

Dr Simon Good

Simon manages a team that develops the Operational Sea Surface Temperature and Sea Ice Analysis (OSTIA) products and works to optimise the use of observations for ocean forecasting.

Areas of expertise

  • Ocean temperature and salinity observations.

  • Quality control.

  • Observational biases and uncertainties.

  • Objective analysis.

My Publications - Good, S

Current activities

Simon is the manager of the Marine Observations Processing and Analysis team within the Ocean Forecasting Research area. One of the team's main activities is to maintain and develop the Operational Sea Surface Temperature and Sea Ice Analysis (Ocean models at the Met Office) system. Near real time OSTIA products are distributed through the Copernicus Marine Environment Monitoring Service (CMEMS) and are used for purposes such as numerical weather prediction. The OSTIA system is also used to produce climate datasets as part of the ESA SST CCI project. The team also produces the GHRSST Multi-Product Ensemble (GMPE) and works to optimise and enhance the use of observations in ocean forecasting.

Career background

Simon joined the Met Office in February 2008. Prior to his current role he was responsible for the maintenance and development of the quality control system for ocean subsurface observations, which he used to produce the EN4 dataset of ocean subsurface temperature and salinity data. The EN4 products are freely available for private study and research purposes from the Met Office Hadley Centre observations webpages. The data are used for a variety of purposes both within the Met Office and externally, including for initialising Decadal prediction and for evaluating Met Office seasonal and climate models outputs. Part of Simon's role was to use the data to determine how the heat content of the oceans has changed over time, and to understand the level of uncertainty in those heat content estimates. Prior to this, he studied for a PhD at the University of Leicester, the topic of which was an investigation of the physical properties of white dwarf stars. After completing his PhD he worked as a post-doctoral research associate, studying retrievals of sea surface temperature from satellite data in the Earth Observation Science research group at the University of Leicester. Immediately before joining the Met Office, he worked at QinetiQ on the processing and analysis of synthetic aperture radar data.