Dr Nick Dunstone
Nick works on near-term climate prediction on seasonal to decadal timescales and understanding the current risk and dynamics driving extreme events.
Areas of expertise
- Seasonal to decadal climate prediction and variability
- Identifying windows of opportunity for making skilful and robust predictions
- Dynamics driving European climate variability and extreme events
- Internal vs external forcing of climate variability
- Using large ensembles to quantify the current risk of unprecedented climate extremes “UNSEEN”
- Annual global mean temperature variability and prediction
Current activities
Nick is a Science Fellow leading a small group of scientists working to understand the mechanisms that drive regional climate variability in different parts of the globe. A physical understanding of the dynamical processes that drive climate variability is key to building confidence in our near-term climate predictions and projections.
Nick has published extensively on seasonal to interannual European climate prediction. His Nature Geoscience paper (Dunstone et al. 2016) advanced prediction skill of the winter North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) on seasonal & interannual timescales and contributed to defining the ‘signal-to-noise paradox’, whereby climate models appear to have spuriously weak forced circulation signals. Nick has also worked on summer seasonal European climate prediction, with a recent paper highlighting a possible role for precursor conditions in the spring stratosphere (Dunstone et al. 2023b). He is currently leading a multi-system international modelling experiment on the less studied interannual (extended-seasonal) climate prediction timescale within the EU ASPECT project.
Nick is also interested in methods to predict and quantify the current risk of near-term climate extremes. His recent Nature Communication article (Dunstone et al. 2023a) examined the devastating Pakistan floods in summer 2022 and explored whether ‘windows of opportunity’ exist to make more confident seasonal climate predictions of such extreme events. Nick’s group also explores what is dynamically possible in the current climate but simply has yet to be observed due to the relatively short historical record. It is now becoming increasingly possible to assess the risk of such unprecedented events using the latest generation of high-resolution climate model simulations. Nick’s group has led the development of the UNSEEN (‘UNprecedented Simulated Extremes using ENsembles’) method that uses the very large ensembles of initialised climate predictions to provide improved estimates of the probability of extreme events. This methodology contributed to the UK Government National Flood Resilience Review (NFRR, published 2016) and has the potential to be valuable to a wide range of users, e.g. the insurance industry.
Career background
Nick is a Met Office Science Fellow and has led the Climate Dynamics group since 2014 - part of the Monthly to Decadal Climate Prediction area led by Prof. Adam Scaife. Prior to this Nick worked mainly in the relatively new area of initialised decadal climate predictions, following the pioneering work by Dr Doug Smith. Nick managed the development of the first high-resolution version of the Met Office Decadal Climate Prediction Sytems (DePreSys3). Before joining the Met Office Hadley Centre in 2008, Nick completed a PhD in Astrophysics at the University of St Andrews in Scotland.
External recognition
- Royal Meteorological Society (RMetS): “Hugh Robert Mill Award for Precipitation Research” in 2023
- L.G. Groves “Memorial Prize for Meteorology” in 2019
- World Meteorological Organization (WMO): “Research Award for Young Scientists” in 2017
- European Geosciences Union (EGU): “Division Outstanding Young Scientists Award” in 2014.