President and Council
Council members and committee chairs:
The Society's affairs are run by Council and its Committees. Council comprises a total of 17 Officers and Ordinary Members of Council elected at the Annual General Meeting. The President, elected for a two-year term, is supported by a Vice-President for Scotland and three other Vice-Presidents, the Treasurer, General Secretary, four main Committee Chairmen and Ordinary Members of Council.
President
PROF JOANNA HAIGH CBE DPhil, FRS, FRMetS
Joanna Haigh enjoyed science from an early age and after a first degree in Physics from Oxford, she took the MSc in Meteorology at Imperial College followed by a return to Oxford for a DPhil in Atmospheric Physics. After a post-doctoral position at Oxford she re-joined Imperial as a Lecturer in 1984, was promoted to Professor of Atmospheric Physics in 2001 and became Head of the Department of Physics in January 2009. She is also a member of the Imperial College Grantham Institute for Climate Change.
Jo has been Editor of Weather and the Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society, was a Lead Author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Third Assessment and has acted on many UK and international panels. Currently she is the UK representative to the International Association of Meteorology and Atmospheric Sciences, Editor of the American Meteorological Society’s Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences, a Member of the Institute of Physics Fellowships panel and of the Royal Society’s Climate Change Advisory Group. She is a Fellow of the Institute of Physics (IOP) and of the Royal Meteorological Society. She received the IOP Charles Chree Medal and Prize 2004 and the RMetS Adrian Gill Award 2010 for her work on solar influences on climate.
Vice Presidents
PROF TIM PALMER DPhil, DSc, FRS
Tim Palmer graduated from the University of Bristol in Mathematics and Physics and went on to study General Relativity Theory for his DPhil at Oxford. In his last year at Oxford, he met Dr Raymond Hide, whose work inspired him to change fields and join the Met Office, though he continued his doctoral work as a part-time lecturer in cosmology at the Open University. During his time at the Met Office, he spent a year at the University of Washington working on stratospheric dynamics. After 9 years at the Met Office he joined the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), where he is currently the Head of the Probability Forecasting and Diagnostics Division. In addition Tim is also a Royal Society Research Professor at Oxford University.
Tim has many distinguished awards and fellowships, including Fellowship of the Royal Meteorological Society since 1978, and is an elected Fellow of the American Meteorological Society and of the Acadamia Europaea. In 2003 Tim became a Fellow of the Royal Society. He is a winner of the 2008 RMetS Adrian Gill Prize, the 2006 World Meteorological Organisation Norbert Gerbier-Mumm International Award, the American Meteorological Society Jule G. Charney Award in 1997 and the Rossby Award in 2010, 1988 RMetS Buchan Prize and the 1986 Royal Society Esso Gold Medal, for energy conservation in the field of aviation.
ELLIE HIGHWOOD PhD, FRMetS
Ellie Highwood is Professor of Climate Physics in the Department of Meteorology at the University of Reading. She did a Bsc in Physics at the University of Manchester before studying for a PhD at Reading, where she has been ever since! Her research interests concern the role of atmospheric particulates (aerosol) in climate and climate change. She has led two international aircraft campaigns to measure the properties of aerosol and has been involved in many others. Research projects have considered Saharan dust, volcanoes, and aerosols from human activities. She has over 40 publications in the peer reviewed literature and a few media appearances. She also teaches introductory meteorology and climate change to undergraduates, and project management to PhD students. Previously she has been a member of RMetS Council and Education Committee, and Editor of Society News. She also writes a regular "climate scientist" column for theWeather magazine.
DAVID SCHULTZ, PhD, FRMetS
David M. Schultz is a reader in the Centre for Atmospheric Science, School of Earth, Atmospheric and Environmental Sciences at the University of Manchester. He was born in Pittsburgh, PA, received his Bachelors degree from M.I.T. in 1987, his Masters degree from the University of Washington in 1990, and his PhD from the State University of New York at Albany in 1996. He spent ten years as a research meteorologist at the NOAA/National Severe Storms Laboratory and University of Oklahoma, and four years as a professor of experimental meteorology at the University of Helsinki and the Finnish Meteorological Institute. He has published over 90 peer-reviewed articles on topics as wide ranging as extratropical cyclones, fronts, conditional symmetric instability, lake-effect snowstorms and lightning, operational forecasting, midlatitude convection, mesoscale observing networks, mammatus, and scientific publishing. He has a special interest in developing more effective communication between research meteorologists and operational forecasters. He won the 2001 American Meteorological Society Editor's Award for Monthly Weather Review. Presently, he is Chief Editor for Monthly Weather Review, cofounder and Assistant Editor for the Electronic Journal of Severe Storms Meteorology, Associate Editor for Atmospheric Science Letters, and on the Editorial Board of Geophysica. He is the author of Eloquent Science: A Practical Guide to Becoming a Better Writer, Speaker, and Atmospheric Scientist.
Vice President for Scotland
DAVID STEVENSON PhD
David Stevenson is Reader in Atmospheric Modelling in the School of GeoSciences at The University of Edinburgh, and works on climate-chemistry interactions. He has a BSc in Geophysics from The University of Liverpool, an MSc in Meteorology from The University of Reading, and a PhD in Volcanology from The Open University. From 1994-1999 he worked at the UK Met. Office, developing and applying the global tropospheric chemistry model STOCHEM. This model, coupled to the Hadley Centre climate model, performed the first century scale coupled chemistry-climate model integrations in 2001. In 2003, he conducted the first global model study of the atmospheric impact of the 1783-84 Laki volcanic eruption. He has contributed to several IPCC and EU reports on climate change and atmospheric chemistry. In 2005 he helped to co-ordinate the ACCENT PhotoComp model intercomparison, and was lead author on its major output on tropospheric ozone. He co-authored the ‘Answers to the Urbino Questions – ACCENT’s first policy-driven synthesis’ in 2006. He was a lead author on the Royal Society’s report on ‘Ground-level ozone in the 21st century: future trends, impacts and policy implications’ in 2008.
Treasurer
ALAN RADFORD
After graduating with a Maths degree from Sussex University, Alan began his Met Office career in 1975 as a research scientist working in Bracknell as part of the NWP modelling team. In the early 1980s he spent several years as an operational forecaster at Strike Command HQ (High Wycombe) and in the Central Forecast Office in Bracknell. Alan spent 5 valuable years from 1986 to 1991 on secondment as a Meteorological Analyst at ECMWF, where he learned a great deal about international collaboration. On his return to the Met Office he managed a variety of functional areas such as graphical forecaster workstation applications and forecast verification.
For the 3 years leading up to retirement Alan returned to his first love when he was appointed Head of Forecasting and Service Delivery, responsible for the delivery of all the Met Office’s weather forecast services to their full range of customers. Since retiring from the Met Office in 2011 Alan has worked part-time as a consultant at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts.
General Secretary
BOB RIDDAWAY PhD FRMetS
Bob Riddaway gained a degree in physics and a PhD in meteorology from Edinburgh University. He then joined the Met Office where initially he was involved in forecasting research but his interests soon turned to operational meteorology and he has held a variety of posts concerned with managing and developing the forecast process. Since his postgraduate days he has participated in a wide range of activities for the Society including being a member of Council and participating in various committees and working groups covering education, publications, accreditation, development of vocational qualifications and establishment of theWeather Club. Also he was the founding Editor of “Meteorological Applications”. Having retired from the Met Office he now works part-time at ECMWF and does some consultancy work for WMO. Currently he is also Chair of theWeather Club Board and Vice President of the European Meteorological Society.
Main Committee Chairs
Accreditation Board Chair
CDR DEREK SWANNICK FRMetS
Climate Science Communications Group
EMILY SHUCKBURGH PhD, FRMetS
Education Committee
GEOFF JENKINS OBE, PhD
House Committee
BOB RIDDAWAY PhD FRMetS
Meetings Committee
EMILY SHUCKBURGH PhD FRMetS
Membership Development Group
BOB RIDDAWAY PhD FRMetS
Scientific Publishing Committee
DAVID SCHULTZ PhD FRMetS
Strategic Programme Board
ELLIE HIGHWOOD PhD, FRMetS
Ordinary Members of Council
LIZ HOWELL
SHANTI MAJITHIA
DAVID MARSHAL, PhD, FRMetS
JENNIFER ROURKE
DUDLEY SHALLCROSS, DPhil, FRMetS
OLIVIER WILD FRMetS
