Julian Charles Roland Hunt, Baron Hunt of Chesterton FRS (born 5 September 1941) is a leading British authority on turbulence modelling, former Director General and Chief Executive of the UK Meteorological Office.[1]
He is Professor of Climate modelling in the Department of Space & Climate Physics and Department of Earth Sciences at University College London.[2] [3]
He was educated at Westminster School and went on to study Mechanical Sciences at Trinity College, Cambridge where he is now a fellow,[4] and gained a first class honours degree in 1963. In 1967 he was awarded a PhD on Aspects of Magnetohydrodynamics from Cambridge. In 1989, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.
He was made a life peer as Baron Hunt of Chesterton, of Chesterton in the County of Cambridgeshire on 5 May 2000.[5] He is the father of historian and Member of Parliament for Stoke-on-Trent Central, Tristram Hunt and journalist and novelist Jemima Hunt.
He followed Sir John Houghton as Director-General and Chief Executive of the Meteorological Office in 1992, consequently being elected to the Executive Committee of the World Meteorological Organisation. Here he was active in negotiating new international arrangements for the exchange of data to ensure that National Meteorological Services worldwide can continue to collaborate with each other at the same time as encouraging the commercial applications of meteorology worldwide. He worked to improve international warnings for disasters, ranging from tropical cyclones to volcanoes, and to emphasise urban meteorology at WMS. He actively promoted collaboration in Europe and was elected Chairman of the Informal Conference on West European Directors for 1994-95. As chief executive of the Met Office, he introduced a programme of quality improvement. Arguably his main task was to restructure the Meteorological Office, as it made its transition to become a Trading Fund in 1996. In 1997 he left the Met Office and was replaced by Peter Ewins.
In recent years he has warned that the pattern of Asian monsoons could be fundamentally altered unless there is a concerted effort to check greenhouse gas emissions in the area.[6] He is chairman of Cambridge Environmental Research Consultants Ltd. [7]