Dr Matthew Priestley

I am a Research Fellow based within Exeter Climate Systems and funded by the Willis Research Network. My current research is on European winter storms, with focus on constructing and evaluating present day risk. Ongoing work involves exploring tail risk, extreme events, and reducing uncertainty in the estimation of these extremes using large ensembles.

My main research interests are:

• Extratropical cyclones and structures
• Storm tracks
• Extreme wind and precipitation events
• Model representation and biases
• Understanding and modelling historical and future variability in extreme events

I supervise the following students:

• Georgie Mercer (2024-)
• Serin Binoy (2025-)
• Toby Jones (2021-2025; now at WTW)

From 2023-2025 I worked as the Insurance Science Engagement Fellow for Royal Meteorological Society. This role involves driving engagement between academia and the insurance sector, providing resources, understanding collaboration, and increasing awareness of research being undertaken by both sectors. Please get in touch via email for more information or visit https://www.rmets.org/special-interest-groups/insurance.

I was previously working on the Emergence Project where I investigated the representation of storm tracks and extratropical cyclones in different groups of CMIP6 models. Recently, we updated future projections of extratropical cyclones and this research fed into the latest assessment report from the IPCC (AR6).

My CMIP6 storm track data of the historical period and future projections is available upon request. You can find details of available data through the link in the sidebar.

If you wish to discuss any research ideas with me please email me - m.priestley@exeter.ac.uk.

My Google Scholar profile is available here.