Professor Tim Palmer

About

Tim Palmer is a Royal Society Research Professor in Climate Physics, and a Senior Fellow at the Oxford Martin Institute.

He is interested in the predictability and dynamics of weather and climate, including extreme events.

He was involved in the first five IPCC assessment reports, and was co-chair of the international scientific steering group of the World Climate Research Programme project (CLIVAR) on climate variability and predictability.

After completing his DPhil at Oxford in the mid 1970s, Tim worked at the UK Meteorological Office and later the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasts. For a large part of his career Tim has developed ensemble methods for predicting uncertainty in weather and climate forecasts.

In 2020 Tim was elected to the US National Academy of Sciences.

The theoretical side of his work explores questions around where climatic processes on different space and time scales interact. On the practical side, he has developed and worked on the application of weather and climate forecasts systems for malaria prediction, flood forecasting, crop yield estimation, and more. Most recently his research has focused on simulating climate at extremely high resolution.