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Dr. Alan Thorpe Chief Executive - National Environment Research Council, Great Britain
ALAN THORPE graduated from the University of Warwick with a physics degree in 1973 and from Imperial College
with a doctorate in atmospheric physics in 1976. He was a postdoctoral researcher at Imperial College for five years and
after a short interval at the Met Office took up a lectureship in the Department of Meteorology at the University of Reading
in 1982. He became a professor of meteorology in 1991 and Head of Department in 1996. His research involved the basic
dynamics and predictability of weather and climate. From 1999 to 2001, Alan was Director of the Met Office’s Hadley
Centre for climate prediction and research. In 2001 he became the first director of the newly established Natural Environment
Research Council (NERC) Centres for Atmospheric Science, which is a distributed NERC Collaborative Centre involving over 15
universities. (see NERC background below) Alan Thorpe is an adviser on some government committees which advise the British
Prime Minister. A recent appointment includes a key role in the Natural Hazard Working Group that the British Prime Minister
set up following the Indian Ocean Tsunami on Boxing Day 2004. Alan Thorpe has been Vice-President of the Royal Meteorological
Society and was awarded their L F Richardson Prize (1979) and Buchan Prize (1992) for his research. He was a founding co-chair
of the World Meteorological Organisation’s research programme “THORPEX: A World Weather Research Programme”.
He is a member of DEFRA’s Science Advisory Council and of a number of national and international science committees.
Professor Thorpe is on leave-of-absence from the University of Reading.
General Public Lecture
“Global Warming: Will Phoenix Fry?”
Wednesday, April 12, 2006 7:30 PM, PSF 166
Abstract: Global warming is an iconic phrase for the many potential human and environmental consequences
humans polluting the atmosphere. It has been likened to a weapon of mass destruction and as a bigger threat than that from
international terrorism. We are carrying out the largest uncontrolled experiment on our environment ever. The possible
outlook? - a hotter climate, sea-level rise and glacier melt with changes to how often we have droughts, heat waves,
hurricanes, storms and episodes of bad air quality. Here we will review the scientific evidence for global warming and assess
the significance of this for Phoenix. The political sensitivities and societal consequences are such that it is crucial that
the scientific evidence is fully and critically scrutinized by policy-makers, scientists, business and the public
alike.
Department of Physics Colloquium
“Predictability of the Weather/Climate Dynamical System”
Thursday, April 13, 2006 4:00 PM, PSF 166
Abstract: Knowledge of future weather and climate states is a classical problem of predicting in a nonlinear
dynamical system. A revolution in the understanding of this problem arose with the advent of chaos theory, which challenged
the idea of Newtonian determinism. The weather is probably the most complex physical system that is routinely, and hugely
successfully, forecast - using physical theory - every day. In this talk advances in the physics of the predictability of
both weather (on timescales of minutes to weeks ahead) and climate - average weather - (from months to millennia) will be
discussed. Recent concepts of predicting how best to observe the current state to optimize the accuracy of forecasts and
ensemble, or probabilistic, prediction methodology will be addressed. The latter invokes a classical uncertainty principle.
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