The Hadley Centre (www) is the climate research division of the Met Office (the UK national meteorological service), specialising in the development of General Circulation Models (GCMs) of the climate system, and in the use of these to predict the consequences of anthropogenic forcings (e.g. CO2 emissions, land-use change). The Hadley Centre is recognised as leading the world in the evolution of GCMs into comprehensive Earth System models, with the Hadley Centre GCM being the first to include an interactive biosphere and carbon cycle.

Richard Betts is manager of the Ecosystems and Climate Impacts research group. He has experience in integrated climate-ecosystem modelling, and has published a number of key papers on the interactions between high-latitude vegetation and climate. In 2000 he published groundbreaking work which demonstrated that in most snow-covered regions, changes in forest cover may affect the Earth’s radiation balance more through surface albedo changes than through CO2 fluxes. He is serving as a lead author on the 4th Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Nicola Gedney is a land surface modeller in the Climate, Chemistry and Ecosystems group. Her work has focused on high latitude wetlands and methane modelling, and large-scale hydrology and soil moisture. She has considerable experience in climate change prediction using earth system models.

Stephen Sitch is an ecosystem research scientist. In his PhD thesis, “The role of vegetation dynamics in the control of atmospheric CO2 content”, he developed the original version of the LPJ Dynamic Global Vegetation Model (DGVM). This activity built upon the existing vegetation models BIOME1 & BIOME3 from the research group, led by Prof. I. Colin Prentice at the Department of Plant Ecology, University of Lund, Sweden.

Sergey Venevsky is a climate system research scientist. He is implementing fire disturbance and permafrost hydrology dynamics into the land surface schemes of the Hadley Climate Models. He has experience in modelling of ecosystem dynamics in high latitudes and published work on interaction between fires, active layer and vegetation in the Arctic and boreal zones.