Peter Thorne

Dr. Thorne completed his PhD in Climate Change Detection and Attribution in 2001 from the Climatic Research Unit in the University of East Anglia. He then worked at the Met Office Hadley Centre in the UK until 2010 within the Climate Monitoring and Attribution group. Initial work concentrated upon tropospheric temperature records. Together with colleagues, he created a radiosonde-based temperature dataset, automated the procedure, and benchmarked it against realistic test cases. This led to a conclusion that radiosonde temperatures were not adequate enough to conclusively inform on the debate about an apparent temperature trend discrepancy between the surface and the troposphere. He also contributed significantly to the CCSP report on this subject including lead-authorship on two chapters. Most recently he led, together with colleagues from NOAA and Reading University, a major review of the issue.

In the past several years Dr. Thorne's focus has turned to creating climate data records from the land surface network. He supervised a PhD project, which yielded a quality, controlled, homogenized surface humidity product at monthly resolution and contributed to subsequent analyses thereof. This analysis utilized the synoptic report resolution Integrated Surface Dataset from NCDC. Subsequent work has been focused on creating a quality-controlled version of this database for solely the long-running stations, which utilize an automated procedure with a view to subsequently undertaking homogenization efforts at the base reporting observation level. Whether this is even possible is an open question being pursued in collaboration with colleagues in the Met Office Hadley Centre and University of New South Wales Climate Change Research Centre.

Dr. Thorne has published on reanalyzes and has sat on a joint Global Climate Observing System / World Climate Research Program working group on observations for reanalyzes. He has also published on radiosonde humidity records and satellite Microwave Sounding Unit datasets.

For the last six years Dr. Thorne has been chair of a Working Group under the Auspices of the Global Climate Observing System whose role is to make the GCOS Reference Upper Air Network a reality. Since September 2010 he has chaired the steering committee of the International Surface Temperatures Initiative.

For the past three years Dr. Thorne has been an editor of the global chapter of the annual State of the Climate report. Dr. Thorne also contributed to two chapters of the IPCC 4th Assessment Working Group 1 report. He is a lead author for Working Group 1 of the IPCC 5th Assessment Report.

Dr. Thorne joined CICS-NC as a senior scientist and research associate professor in May 2010.