An external view of the Met Office building at night.

Dr Stacey New

Stacey is an applied climate scientist focused on the development of climate services to guide resilience and adaptation decisions, primarily in Europe and Asia.

Areas of expertise

  • Wildfire science
  • Co-production of climate services using multi-disciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches
  • Climate services user engagement 
  • Workshop facilitation 

Current activities

Stacey is a scientist with a background in wildfire science and climate change research. She is currently working on CSSP China, a collaborative project supported by the Newton Fund and which is led by the Met Office in the UK and by the China Meteorological Administration and Institute of Atmospheric Physics in China. An important part of her role in CSSP China is building relationships between users and providers of climate information in China and the UK.

She is also part of the Climateurope2 project which aims to develop future equitable and quality-assured climate services of greater value to society, which will provide trustworthy, user-relevant and usable information.

As a STEM Ambassador, Stacey takes part in events to promote the Met Office and science subjects to young people. In March 2020, she took part in the 'I'm a Scientist, get me out of here' outreach competition and was voted for by school pupils from across the UK as the winner of her zone where she won a £500 grant to spend on STEM related activities.

Career background

Stacey joined the Met Office in September 2019 after completing her NERC funded PhD at the University of Exeter. Her PhD entitled “Charcoal reflectance: A quantitative approach to understanding the impact of fire on an ecosystem'” focused on the analysis of charcoal from wildfires and experimental fires in the USA, UK and Amazon Rainforest. Her work developed the charcoal reflectance method into a novel metric with which to assess fire severity and begin to explore the relationship between this and the amount of energy that has been delivered across a burned area. 

Stacey also has a strong background in climate change science obtaining a BSc (Hons) Geography degree and a MRes Climate Change Impacts and Feedbacks degree from the University of Exeter.