Matthew Perry
Matthew is a senior applied scientist working on weather and climate impacts and resilience.
Areas of expertise
- UK and global climatology
- Statistical data analysis and visualisation
- Assessing weather and climate risks
- Communicating results to customers
Email [email protected]
Current activities
Matthew’s role as a senior applied scientist in the Defence Applications team is to lead, manage and deliver projects which provide insights to inform customer decision-making. He analyses spatial and temporal weather and climate patterns in big datasets to assess potential impacts on defence operations and equipment. He also has particular expertise in fire weather for the UK, including developing future projections which highlight the emerging risk of wildfire.
Career background
Matthew’s first degree was in Geography and Geology at Keele University, then he gained an MSc. in Environmental Statistics and Systems from Lancaster University in 1997.
After working as a Data Analyst at the Higher Education Statistics Agency and the National Grid, he joined the Met Office in 2001. In his first role as a climatologist, Matthew was responsible for developing and applying methods for the analysis and presentation of UK climate data, including spatial analysis using GIS tools, statistical analysis of trends, the management of a database of climate statistics, and the creation of gridded datasets which have been widely used.
Since 2008, Matthew has focussed on applying statistical analysis of weather and climate data to address customer issues across a range of sectors. Examples of projects included extreme value analysis of snow and ice loading and wind speed to estimate risks for nuclear sites, an assessment of the range of temperature conditions for the transport of nuclear material, the development of methods for generating complete weather datasets for gas demand modelling, and a study of the relationship between high turbidity events in river water and heavy rainfall for a water company.
From 2014 to 2016, Matthew spent two years working in the Weather and Energy team at CSIRO in Canberra, Australia, carrying out research and analysis on meteorological aspects of solar energy.