An external view of the Met Office building at night.

Professor Simon Vosper

Simon is the Executive Director of Science, leading the Met Office Science Directorate

Areas of expertise

  • Orographic flows
  • Internal gravity waves and boundary-layer flow
  • Model development
  • Numerical Weather Prediction

Publications by Simon Vosper

Current activities

As the Director of Science at the Met Office Simon is a member of the Executive Board and leads the Science directorate, with accountability for the Met Office’s world-leading research in Foundation, Weather and Climate Science and for developing underpinning capability for scientific products and services. This includes the Unified Model seamless modelling system for weather and climate science applications.

Simon sponsors the Met Office Next Generation Modelling Systems programme which will reformulate and redesign the Met Office’s complete weather and climate research and operational/production systems, enabling exploitation of future generations of supercomputers.

Career background

Simon joined the Met Office in 2001 as a research scientist. Prior to this he was based at the University of Leeds (including stints at the University of Surrey) as a postdoctoral research fellow, latterly funded by the NERC postdoctoral fellowship scheme.

Simon completed a PhD on the behaviour of orographic internal gravity waves at the Department of Applied Mathematical Studies, University of Leeds in 1995. Following this he worked as a postdoctoral research fellow on a number of projects at the School of Earth and Environment at the University of Leeds and at the University of Surrey. His experience includes participation in and coordination of field measurement programmes, fluid dynamical laboratory experiments and numerical modelling.

At the Met Office Simon has overseen the development of major upgrades to the Met Office Unified Model, including the Global Atmosphere and Regional Atmosphere seamless science configurations which are used in both weather and climate applications. His personal contributions include improvements to the dynamical core and the orographic drag parametrization schemes.

External recognition

  • Simon was awarded the L.F. Richardson Prize in 2005. The L.F. Richardson prize is awarded annually for an outstanding paper published in the Royal Meteorological Society journals by an author under the age of 35.

  • Simon was awarded the L.G. Groves Memorial Prize for Meteorology in 2007. This is awarded annually to members of the Met Office and the Royal Navy, Army and RAF for the most important contributions to the science of meteorology, the application of meteorology to aviation or operational meteorology.

  • Simon is a member of the NERC Science Committee.

  • Simon leads the Met Office-NERC Joint Weather and Climate Research Programme. 

  • Simon is a Visiting Professor at School of Earth and Environment, University of Leeds.