Profile

Myles Allen is Professor of Geosystem Science in the School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford and Head of the Climate Dynamics Group in the University's Department of Physics. His research focuses on how human and natural influences on climate contribute to observed climate change and risks of extreme weather and in quantifying their implications for long-range climate forecasts.

Myles has served on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as Lead Author on Detection of Climate Change and Attribution of Causes for the 3rd Assessment in 2001 and as Review Editor on Global Climate Projections for the 4th Assessment in 2007.

He proposed the use of Probabilistic Event Attribution to quantify the contribution of human and other external influences on climate to specific individual weather events and leads the www.climateprediction.net project, using distributed computing to run the world’s largest ensemble climate modelling experiments.

Current/recent responsibilities

• Research Cluster coordinator: Climate, School of Geography and the Environment.
• Group Leader, Climate Dynamics Group, Department of Physics, University of Oxford. Responsible for climate modelling and attribution, comprising on average 4 post-docs and 5 doctoral students over the past three years.
• Principal Investigator, "www.climateprediction.net - distributed computing for global climate research", collaborative project (2000 present, overall budget c. £4m), performing large-scale Monte Carlo simulation of climate change 1900 - 2100 using idle CPU on personal computers volunteered by the general public.
• Lead Author, "Detection of Climate Change and Attribution of Causes", Chapter 12 of the IPCC WG1 Third Assessment. Review Editor, "Global Climate Projections" Chapter 10 of the IPCC WG1 Fourth Assessment. Lead author, "Detection and Attribution of Climate Change: from Global to Regional", Chapter 10 of the IPCC WG1 Fifth Assessment.
• Member of the US NOAA/Dept of Energy International Advisory Group on the Detection and Attribution of Anthropogenic Climate Change.

Selected publications

• P. Pall et al, Anthropogenic greenhouse gas contribution to flood risk in England and Wales in autumn 2000, Nature, 470:382-385, 2011 (Cover).
• K. Ricke, M. Granger Morgan and M. R. Allen, Regional climate response to solar radiation management, Nature Geoscience, 3:537-541, 2010.
• M. R. Allen et al: The Case for Mandatory sequestration, Nature Geoscience, 2:813-814, 2009.
• *M. R. Allen et al: Warming caused by cumulative carbon emissions towards the trillionth tonne, Nature, 458:1163-1166, 2009.
• M. Meinshausen et al. Greenhouse gas emission targets for limiting global warming to 2C, Nature, 458:1158-1162, 2009.
• F. H. Lambert and M. R. Allen: Are changes in global precipitation constrained by the tropospheric energy budget? J. Climate, 22:499-517, 2009
• B. M. Sanderson et al: Towards constraining climate sensitivity by linear analysis of feedback patterns in thousands of perturbed-physics GCM simulations, Climate Dynamics, 30:175-190, 2008.
• *M. R. Allen et al: Scientific challenges in the attribution of harm to human influence on climate, Pennsylvania Law Review, 155:1353-1400, 2007.
• M. R. Allen and D. J. Frame, Call off the quest, Science, 318:582-583, 2007.
• P. Pall, M. R. Allen & D. A. Stone, Testing the Clausius-Clapeyron constraint on changes in extreme precipitation under CO¬2 warming, Climate Dynamics, 28:351-363, 2007.
• D. J. Frame et al: Probabilistic climate forecasts and inductive problems, Phil. Trans. Roy. Soc. A, 365:1971-1992, 2007.
• C. Piani et al: Constraints on climate change from a multi-thousand member ensemble of simulations, Geophys. Res. Lett., 32:L23825, 2005.
• *D. A. Stainforth, et al. Uncertainty in predictions of the climate response to rising levels of greenhouse gases. Nature, 433:403–406, 2005.
• *P. A. Stott, D. A. Stone and M. R. Allen, Human contribution to the European heatwave of 2003, Nature, 432:610-614, 2004.
• F. H. Lambert et al: Detection and attribution of changes in 20th century land precipitation, Geophys. Res. Lett., 31:L01203, 2004.
• M. R. Allen: Liability for Climate Change, Nature, 421:891-892, 2003.
• *M. R. Allen and W. J. Ingram, Constraints on future changes in climate and the hydrologic cycle, Nature, 419:224-230, 2002
• C. E. Forest et al: Quantifying uncertainties in climate system properties with the use of recent climate observations, Science, 295:113–117, 2002.
• P. A. Stott et al: External control of twentieth century temperature by natural and anthropogenic forcings. Science, 290:2133–2137, 2000.
• *M. R. Allen et al: Quantifying the uncertainty in forecasts of anthropogenic climate change, Nature, 407:617-620, 2000.
• S. F. B. Tett, P. A. Stott, M. R. Allen, W. J. Ingram and J. F. B. Mitchell: Causes of twentieth century temperature change near the earth’s surface. Nature, 399:569–572, 1999.
• M. R. Allen and S. F. B. Tett: Checking for model consistency in optimal fingerprinting. Climate Dynamics, 15:419–434, 1999.
• S. F. B. Tett et al: Human influence on the atmospheric vertical temperature structure: detection and observations, Science, 274:1170-1173, 1996.
• M. R. Allen and L. A. Smith: Monte Carlo SSA: Detecting irregular oscillations in the presence of coloured noise, J. Climate, 9:3373-3404, 1996.
• M. R. Allen and M. K. Davey: Empirical parameterization of tropical ocean-atmosphere coupling: the "Inverse Gill Problem", J. Climate, 6:509-530, 1993