An external view of the Met Office building at night.

Dr Mark Ringer

Mark leads a team studying feedbacks in the climate system.

Areas of expertise

  • Clouds, water vapour and radiation.

  • Use of satellite data for climate studies.

  • Climate model development and evaluation.

Current activities

Mark manages the Climate sensitivity and feedbacks group which is part of Understanding Climate Change. The team seeks to understand the most important feedbacks operating in past, present and future climates and to improve their representation in climate models.
 
Mark's primary research interest is the use of satellite data for understanding the climate system, and evaluating and developing climate models. The bulk of Mark's work focuses on clouds, water vapour and the radiation budget and their associated feedbacks in the present-day climate and in the context of climate change. Much of Mark's work has concentrated on understanding cloud radiative feedbacks and variability in the tropics. Recently, Mark has also become interested in the application of GPS radio occultation data to long-term climate monitoring and model evaluation. Over the last few years Mark has been very involved in the development of the Met Office Hadley Centre climate model and is currently leading a team focusing on the implementation of a new cloud scheme in the latest model, Met Office climate prediction model: HadGEM3 family.

Career background

Mark completed a PhD in Meteorology at the University of Reading in 1994 and followed this with a post-doctoral research fellowship at the Laboratoire de Météorologie Dynamique in Paris. Mark joined the Met Office in July 1997 and started his career in the Satellite Applications section of the Numerical Weather Prediction division before moving to the Met Office Hadley Centre in 2000.

Mark then worked in the Earth Observation group until 2002, when he switched to the Climate Sensitivity group, which he has led since 2005. In 1998 Mark spent four months at the Centre de Météorologie Spatiale in Lannion, France as a EUMETSAT visiting research fellow; in 2005 he temporarily managed the climate model development and evaluation group in for seven months.

External recognition

  • Member of the GEWEX radiation panel.

  • Member of EUMETSAT working group on climate monitoring.

  • Member of the EUMETSAT GRAS science review group.

  • Member of the GERB project steering group.

  • Member of the CERES Climate Model and Analysis Advisory Group.