John leads the development of the digital ocean portfolio at the National Oceanography Centre. John is an Honorary Fellow at the Met Office, and a Senior Research Fellow of the Turing Institute. Internationally, he is a member of the GOOS Steering Committee and also sits on the Steering Committee of the Digital Twins of the Ocean programme.
Prior to his time at NOC he was at the Met Office where he was Head of the Ocean Forecasting R&D Department (OFRD) group and co-chair of the National Partnership for Ocean Prediction (NPOP). As Head of OFRD he had responsibility for developing models and satellite analyses for short-range ocean monitoring and forecasting and producing reanalyses for monitoring marine environment. Amongst other responsibilities, he led the Newton Programme’s India project, coordinating work in the Met Office and in UK academia with that at the Ministry of Earth Science in India. He was also a Management Board Member of Mercator Ocean.
His background is in shelf seas modelling and his research has primarily been the development of ocean models. He led the ocean model developments based on NEMO for applications across the Met Office for a number of years before becoming Head of Ocean Forecasting in 2014.
Prior to his career at the Met Office John worked for the Natural Environmental Research Council at Plymouth Marine Laboratory as a mathematical modeller in a biogeochemistry modelling team with the primary responsibility for implementing marine dynamical models.
GOOS Steering Committee
SG OOIS - WMO Study Group on Ocean Infrastructure Systems
WMO JET-EOSDE – Working Group on the Rolling Review of Requirements
NERC Constructing a Digital Environment Expert Network – UK Senior Expert
Previously:
Mercator Ocean International Management Board
National Partnership for Ocean Prediction Co-Chair
EuroGOOS Science Advisory Working Group
NOOS Steering Committee Member
OceanPredict Advisory and Sponsors (OPAS) Group co-Chair