An external view of the Met Office building at night.

Dr Leon Hermanson

Leon works on understanding predictability from seasonal to decadal time scales.

Areas of expertise

  • Drivers of climate variability and change
  • Development of climate services from annual-to-decadal prediction
  • Mechanisms that give rise to predictability on seasonal-to-decadal time scales
  • Predictability of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation and its impacts

Publications by Leon Hermanson

Current activities

Leon is interested in improving annual-to-decadal predictions and creating user-relevant information suitable for climate services based on these predictions. He leads the work on developing the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO/OMM) Lead Centre for Annual-to-Decadal Climate Prediction, which is hosted at the Met Office. He is a member of the World Climate Research Programme Working Group on Subseasonal-to-Interdecadal Prediction.

 

As part of the Met Office Predictability Research Group (formerly the Decadal Prediction Group), Leon works on developing and running the Met Office Decadal Prediction System DePreSys. He led the technical work to bring decadal prediction from an experimental activity to an operational activity, which is suitable for developing climate services from.

 

Leon also works alongside other researchers in the Met Office and academia to understand and predict climate variability and is particularly interested in North Atlantic climate variability of phenomena such as wind storms, hurricanes, and the predictability of the North Atlantic Ocean northward heat transport.

 

Career background

Leon joined the Predictability Research Group at the Met Office Hadley Centre in 2011 and became an Expert Scientist in 2023. Previously, he worked at the University of Reading with Prof. Rowan Sutton, and has been involved in research on decadal prediction since 2006. He was seconded to the Met Office in 2009 to work on initialisation of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) in Met Office decadal prediction system: DePreSys. Leon completed a PhD in Meteorology in 2006 at the University of Reading supervised by Sir Brian Hoskins.