Peter Thorne

Biography

I am a Professor in Physical Geography (Climate Change) at Maynooth University in Ireland and Director of the Irish Climate Analysis and Research UnitS group (ICARUS). I'm on all the usual academia type things its de rigueur to be on nowadays: ResearcherID: F-2225-2014 ORCID: 0000-0003-0485-9798 Researchgate: Peter Thorne Google scholar: citation page I completed my PhD in 2001 at the University of East Anglia and have since worked in a mix of government, academia and research SMEs across 4 countries (UK, USA, Norway and Ireland). My main historical interests have been in the investigation of observed climate changes globally, with a particular emphasis upon temperature and humidity changes from in-situ measurements (marine, land and weather balloon). I have also undertaken publication on detection and attribution (which was the subject of my PhD thesis) and atmospheric reanalyses. I am the chair of the International Surface Temperature Initiative which consists of an interdisciplinary effort to create a suite of improved Land Surface Air Temperature products to meet science needs and societal expectations in the era of climate services. The initiative has four principal aims: Improving the completeness and provenance of available basic data holdings Promoting the development of novel techniques of homogenization to the basic data holdings Benchmarking the performance of candidate techniques of homogenization against synthetically produced analogs to the real world holdings Provision of products, tools, and guidance to end-users I am co-chair of the GCOS Working Group on the Global Climate Observing System Reference Upper Air Network (GRUAN). The GRUAN network aims to instigate a maintain on a multidecadal basis a high quality reference network of traceable and comparable measurement capabilities at a subset of global locations in support of monitoring, characterising broader aspects of the global observing system (including satellites) and process understanding. I am also the project lead on the Horizon 2020 GAIA-CLIM project which aims to use such measurements to better characterise satellite measurements. I was a Lead Author on 5th Assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the 2014 US National Climate Assessment. I was also a Lead Author on the US CCSP1.1 report on atmospheric temperature trends. Over 2009 to 2015 I was an editor on the global chapter of the annual State of the Climate series of reports in BAMS

Research Interest

Geography