Tim's work aims to improve our understanding of climate change by evaluating climate change mechanisms and processes. He is interested in understanding how different climate forcing agents perturb the Earth's energy budget and how this relates to climate responses on different timescales. The bulk of Tim's work involves running climate model experiments to diagnose forcing, feedbacks and heat uptake in the climate system. Recently, Tim has been involved in assessing the sensitivity of our new earth system model, Met Office climate prediction model: HadGEM2 family, to radiative forcing. This allows him to quantify the importance of the earth system in climate change, compared to the more the physical drivers of climate change.

Tim also works on the links between the global energy and water cycles. He is trying to understand how different climate forcing agents, such carbon dioxide or black carbon, perturb the atmospheric and surface energy budgets, and how this influences global precipitation. Hopefully this might lead to improved predictions of regional precipitation changes.