I gained my PhD from the Reading Meteorology department in 1998, on modelling the variability in the Earth's radiation budget under the supervision of Profs. Keith Shine and Tony Slingo, and have since published over 30 scientific papers in peer reviewed journals, covering water vapour feedback, variability in clouds and radiation, changes in the hydrological cycle and evaluation of weather forecast/climate models and reanalyses. I worked at the Met Office Hadley Centre in the Model Parametrization, Earth Observation and Climate Change sections and with the European Centre for Medium-range Weather Forecast (ECMWF), contributing to evaluation of the ERA40 reanalysis. Secondments to the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (Princeton) and NASA Langley Research Center (Virginia) in 1999 lead to significant collaborations between the modelling and Earth observation communities and culminated in a high profile paper winning the NASA HJ Reid award. In 2003, I moved to the Environmental Systems Science Centre (ESSC) at the University of Reading where strong ties with the Met Office Numerical Weather Prediction section were forged, exploiting satellite data from the Geostationary Earth Radiation Budget (GERB) instrument; I have been a member of the GERB International Science team since 1998.

A NERC advanced Fellowship was awarded in 2005 working on the atmospheric hydrological cycle and climate feedbacks. Since then I contributed to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) with authorship on two chapters of the 2007 report and provide expert reviews for the IPCC, scientific journals and international funding agencies, being a member of the NERC peer review college, an Associate Editor for the Journal of Climate and the recipient of the American Geophysical Union Editors' citation for excellence. I recently organized a special session at the AGU Fall Meeting on "Dynamic and Thermodynamic Controls of the Global Water Cycle in the 20th and 21st Centuries". Current research has focused on monitoring and understanding large-scale changes in the global water cycle, including precipitation and its extremes, using satellite data and climate prediction models.