An external view of the Met Office building at night.

Mat Collins

Mat is currently Associate Professor in Climate Systems at Exeter University and a Met Office Hadley Centre visiting Scientist.

Areas of expertise

  • Quantifying uncertainty in climate projections.

  • Understanding climate change and climate variability, including palaeoclimates.

  • International modelling comparisons (CMIP).

  • El Nino Southern Oscillation and climate change.

Current Activities

Mat is currently co-managing the MOHC contribution to CMIP5. This involves the coordination of climate model experiments, saving of the correct diagnostics and delivery of those diagnostics to the CMIP5 data archive. A specific aspect of responsibility is for the decadal prediction experiments.

More information about current research activities, publications and other activities can be found at his Exeter University web site.

Career Background

Mat worked for the MOHC from 1997-2010 in the Climate Prediction group with 3 years secondment to the University of Reading to work on a NERC-funded directed programme on coupled atmosphere-ocean processes. Prior to that he was a post-doctoral research assistant at the University of Oxford and has a PhD in Meteorology from the University of Reading.

External Recognition

He was recently an expert advisor to the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution Adaptation report, the UK Climate Change Committee and the Stern Review of the Economics of Climate Change. Mat has over 60 peer-reviewed publications and has been a contributing author on two of the most recent IPCC reports. In 2009 he was awarded a Met Office Awards for Excellence for outstanding scientific achievement for his contribution to the UKCP09 climate projections.