Stephen Belcher

Stephen Belcher became Met Office Chief Scientist in December 2016 having formerly been the Director of the Met Office Hadley Centre for climate science and services, and Professor of Meteorology at the University of Reading.

As the Chief Scientist, Stephen directs the Met Office Science Programme and is responsible for a team of over 500 scientists. Met Office science covers a wide range of research including numerical weather prediction, observations of the atmosphere and the oceans, climate change projections and scientific software engineering.

Since obtaining his PhD in fluid dynamics from the University of Cambridge in 1990, Stephen has published over 100 peer-reviewed papers on a wide variety of topics in atmospheric and oceanic turbulence. Having completed his PhD he became a research fellow at Stanford and Cambridge Universities. In 1994 he moved to the Department of Meteorology at the University of Reading, where he served as Head of the School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences between 2007 and 2010. In 2010 he became the Joint Met Office Chair in Weather Systems.