An external view of the Met Office building at night.

Chris Jones

Chris leads research into vegetation and carbon cycle modelling and their interactions with climate.

Areas of expertise

  • Global modelling of the Earth system, especially land and marine ecosystems

  • Climate-carbon cycle feedbacks

  • Mitigation science and advice

Publications by Chris Jones

Current activities

Chris  chairs numerous international activities including:

  • the Coupled Climate Carbon Cycle model intercomparison project (known as C4MIP)
  • a related activity known as ZECMIP (to determine the zero-emissions commitment: the continued warming after emissions of CO2 cease)

and is on the steering committee for others including:

Chris is the UK science leader of the Newton funded Climate Science for Services Partnership with Brazil (CSSP-Brasil).  This project brings together a UK community of researchers with counterparts at 3 Brazil partner organisations (INPE, INPA and CEMADEN) in order to develop science research which can underpin Climate services of societal benefit to Brazil.  Activities focus specifically on Brazil's ecosystems, carbon balance and land-use; predictions of changes in rainfall across timescales; climate impacts such as on crops and river flow.

Chris is also a Research Theme leader in the EU H2020 project, CRESCENDO, leading activity to build and evaluate European climate models to ensure they as closely as possible simulate observed behaviour of the Earth system.

Career background

Chris joined the Met Office in 1993  and worked for 3 years in Weather Science on data assimilation techniques of radar rainfall data into the UK mesoscale model.

Chris moved the Met Office Hadley Centre in 1997 to work on the first coupled climate-carbon cycle model which revealed strong feedbacks between climate change and the world's ecosystems.  These meant that more CO2 is left in the atmosphere meaning we have to re-think how to reduce our emissions to meet climate targets.  From 2011-2019 Chris led the Earth System and Mitigation Science team where he led activities to build the HadGEM2-ES climate model and deliver data to CMIP5.  More recently the team contributed to building the UKESM1 model for CMIP6.

External recognition

Chris has twice been an IPCC Lead Author - for the Carbon cycle chapter of AR5 WG1 and currently for the Global Projections chapter of AR6 WG1.

Steering committee of the Global Carbon Project.