Dr Jeremy Walton

Areas of expertise

• Development of large-scale software systems

• Leadership of software development teams and projects

• Algorithms and techniques for high-performance computing

• Technical writing, public speaking

Current activities

Jeremy is the lead computational scientist for the UK Earth System Model (UKESM).  This includes management of the software engineers who are working on the development of the model and its infrastructure, with a particular focus on the optimisation of the model to ensure that it runs efficiently.  Jeremy also liaises with technical collaborators who are developing UKESM components and system enhancements, and coordinates technical support for external UKESM development and applications.
 
A major application of UKESM will be the next round of the Climate Model Intercomparison Project (aka CMIP6), which aims for a better understanding of climate change in a multi-model context.  UKESM and other climate models will be used to run the same set of experiments, and comparison between their results will be used to assess their performance and quantify the spread amongst future projections.   Jeremy chairs the CMIP6 Project Team at the Met Office; this is currently focused on preparing for CMIP6 by ensuring that the UKESM components are ready for the CMIP6 runs, and that procedures are in place for crafting the model output so that it is accessible by the climate community.
 

Career background

Jeremy joined the NERC-Met Office UKESM core group in 2014 as scientific systems manager.  Prior to that, he was the scientific software engineer in the UM Collaboration team.  Before joining the Met Office in 2013, he worked as a senior technical consultant at the Numerical Algorithms Group, and as a software developer for BP Research.    He holds a B.Sc. Hons (1st Class) in Chemistry from Imperial College London (1980), and a D.Phil. in Theoretical Chemistry from the University of Oxford (1984).