An external view of the Met Office building at night.

Dr François-Xavier Bocquet

François-Xavier manages the space weather research team. His main research interests are heliospheric and ionospheric physics.

Current activities

François-Xavier leads the space weather research team which provides research-to-operations (R20) support for the Met Office Space Weather Operations Centre (MOSWOC), so that MOSWOC forecasters have the state-of-the-art observations and models they need to provide their space weather forecasts to customers. Additionally, the team performs an operations-to-research (O2R) role, providing feedback on model performance to the scientific community. The team is charged with transitioning scientific research into operational space weather products.

He is currently working on:

  • the transition to operations of the various models delivered as part of the £20m SWIMMR project, delivering new capability to the forecasters
  • preparing Met Office systems for new observational data sources, e.g. GOES-U, SWFO-L1, Vigil

Areas of expertise

  • Solar wind modelling
  • Coronal mass ejections
  • Ionospheric modelling 
  • Machine learning

Career background

François-Xavier has been managing the Space Weather research team at the Met Office since 2023, focusing on transitioning research models to operations. Prior to this he worked at Spire Global on ionospheric radio-occultation observations and ionospheric modelling as part of the European Space Agency (ESA) HRIDE project. He also worked at ESA as a space weather applications scientist.

Before joining ESA, he had been working at the Met Office, originally in the Ocean Forecasting R&D team where he worked on the inclusion of ocean surface wave effects into a global coupled ocean-atmosphere system, and subsequently within the Space Weather R&D team since its creation in 2012.

He has completed a PhD in Solar Physics in St Andrews, with a PhD focused on the use of relaxation codes to study the evolution of coronal magnetic fields. Prior to this, he completed a degree of Ingénieur Civil Physicien (MEng) at the Université Libre de Bruxelles.