An external view of the Met Office building at night.

Dr Cyril Morcrette

Cyril leads a team improving the way that clouds and radiation are represented in weather forecasts and climate simulations.

Areas of expertise

  • Cloud parametrization

  • Initiation of atmospheric convection

  • Slantwise convection and conditional symmetric instability

Publications by Cyril

Current activities

Cyril is a science manager within the Atmospheric Processes and Parametrizations team. He leads the Clouds and Radiation group which is working on improving the Met Office Unified Model, which is used for both weather forecasting and climate prediction. The group focuses on:

  • improving the representation of clouds within the atmosphere
  • developing better ways of representing the interaction between clouds and radiation
  • improving the representation of radiative transfer in clear-sky.

Cyril is involved in running the Clouds Above the United States and Errors at the Surface (CAUSES) project. This is a multi-model comparison study, aimed at understanding the physical processes affecting the skill of surface temperature forecasts over the American mid-west. Cyril is keen to make use of observations, for example from the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) program to get a better understanding of physical processes affecting the performance of the Unified Model and to use these observations to develop better parametrization schemes.

Previously, Cyril's work focused on the development and evaluation of the prognostic cloud scheme (PC2). Cyril is the code-owner of the cloud parametrization scheme. He has also maintained his interest in conditional symmetric instability (CSI) and has co-supervised PhD students based at the University of Reading and at Imperial College London.

Career background

Cyril has been leading the Cloud and Radiation group since 2013 and has been a member of Atmospheric Processes and Parametrizations since joining the Met Office in 2006. Previously, Cyril obtained a degree in physics from the University of Warwick and a PhD in meteorology from the University of Reading. As a post-doc in the Department of Meteorology at the University of Reading, he carried out research on the initiation of convective storms in the British Isles.

External Recognition

Cyril was awarded the L F Richardson Prize in 2015 for his paper on the evaluation of cloud schemes using ARM and Cloud-Net data. The L F Richardson prize is awarded annually for an outstanding paper published in the Royal Meteorological Society journals by an author under the age of 35.