Professor John Thuburn

Brief Biography

I graduated from Cambridge with an MA and Certificate of Advanced Study in Mathematics. I then obtained a DPhil from Oxford for a project on middle atmosphere dynamics. I worked for 16 years at the Department of Meteorology, University of Reading, first as a postdoc on the UK Universities Global Atmospheric Modelling Project (UGAMP), later as a Lecturer then Reader.

In 2005 I moved to Exeter to take up a Chair in Geophysical Fluid Dynamics, jointly funded by the Met Office, a post that now comes under the Met Office Academic Partnership (MOAP). For over 20 years I have been collaborating closely with the Met Office Dynamics Research group on numerical methods for weather and climate models. The ENDGame dynamical core, on which I collaborated, has been used successfully in operational forecasting since 2014. I have also been involved in two major RCUK - Met Office collaborations: Gung Ho, to develop an atmospheric dynamical core suitable for future supercomputing architectures, and, ParaCon, to improve the representation of cumulus convection in the Met Office Unified Model.