An external view of the Met Office building at night.

Dr John Eyre

John undertakes research and development to improve exploitation of satellite data in numerical weather prediction and other applications in weather and climate.

Areas of expertise

  • Weather satellite data

  • Radiative transfer

  • Inverse and retrieval methods

  • Data assimilation

  • Observing-system design

Publications by John

Current activities

John manages and conducts R&D which aims to:

  • Improve the exploitation of data currently available from weather and other environmental satellites
  • Prepare for the exploitation of data expected from new satellite instruments to be launched in the next few years
  • Contribute to studies to define future generations of weather satellites and their instruments.

Most of these activities have the goal of improving the performance of NWP, through improvements in satellite data and their methods of exploitation. Some of the work is targeted on improvements in forecasting, in climate analysis and in other environmental applications.

He devotes a significant fraction of his time to working with EUMETSAT and WMO - on the specification of future operational weather satellites, and on the evolution of global observing systems.

He continues to participate in personal research on theoretical aspects of retrieval and assimilation problems concerning the use of satellite sounding data in NWP.

Career background

John joined the Met Office in Bracknell in 1978, with a BA in Physics and a DPhil in Atmospheric Physics from the University of Oxford. For his doctorate he studied radiometric measurements of minor constituents affecting ozone concentrations in the stratosphere.

At the Met Office, John worked first as research scientist within the Satellite Meteorology branch, becoming manager of the Satellite Data Research Group in 1983. From 1984-90, he was back in Oxford leading the Met Office Unit within the Robert Hooke Institute for Cooperative Atmospheric Research. This period included a year as a Senior Visiting Scientist at the CIMSS at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

In 1990, he was appointed as Head of the newly-formed Satellite Section at ECMWF in Reading. He returned to the Met Office in 1995 and took the position of Head of Satellite Applications, which he held until 2014, first in Bracknell and from 2004 in Exeter, with a short interlude in 2003-4 to lead the Met Office's Satellite Applications group at the University of Reading. He is now a Met Office Fellow in Satellite Applications.

His personal research contributions have been mainly on: infra-red and microwave radiative transfer modelling, retrieval of atmospheric temperature and composition from satellite observations, assimilation of remotely-sensed observations into NWP models, and the design of future observing systems. 

External Recognition