An external view of the Met Office building at night.

Dr Dave Jones

Dave leads the Applied Weather Science group.

Areas of expertise

  • Identification of scientific solutions to meet customer needs
  • Calibration of airborne passive microwave sensors
  • Microwave radiative transfer modelling and retrieval

My Publications - Jones, D

Current activities

Dave leads the Customer Applications group within Weather Science. The work of the group is diverse including conducting research and developing applications to enable the operational provision of services to customers to help them manage the impact of weather on their business.

Areas of focus include:

  • aviation meteorology
  • defence
  • commercial product development
  • provision of historic weather data and analysis
  • air quality
  • developing and applying dispersion science for emergency response activities
  • application of dispersion science to support government policy

More details on each are available from the Applied weather science.

Career background

Dave began his Met Office career in the Remote Sensing Instrumentation branch (RSI) at Farnborough, where he was the instrument scientist for the Microwave Airborne Radiometer Scanning System (MARSS) on board the Office's C-130 Hercules aircraft, 'Snoopy'. During his time at Farnborough, he completed his PhD on the aircraft validation of microwave radiative transfer models before taking up a two-year secondment as a Visiting Scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in 1996, where he worked within the ARM UAV (Atmospheric Radiation Measurement Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) Programme.

Dave returned to the Satellite Applications group in Weather Science in 1998, working on the interpretation of AMSU (Advanced Microwave Sounding Unit) data, before taking up a secondment in the MoD's Meteorological Support Group (MSG) in 2002. While there he acted as the MoD customer for the Met Office's defence research programme and gained the commitment of MoD to support the continued development of the Met Office's defence-specific Crisis Area Model numerical weather prediction capability.  

Dave returned to the Met Office as Deputy Programme Manager for Defence Business in 2003, before taking on the corporate role of Chief Scientist Support in 2007 when he developed the socio-economic business case for the current IBM supercomputer system. In 2009, he moved into the newly-formed Strategic Marketing Product Group as Head of Science Pull-through, with a focus on anticipating how the Met Office could best exploit its upcoming science capabilities in its product range.  In 2010, Dave rejoined Weather Science to become Head of Customer Applications, where his primary interest is in maximising the information content in our forecasts to aid customer decision-making.