Helen Roberts

Personal statement:

I joined the Met Office as a trainee weather forecaster in 2003, and spent much of my career as an Operational Meteorologist working in a variety of sectors, including military, transport, retail and media. Having completed an MSc in psychology, I am the UK’s first Socio-Meteorologist, working at the intersection of the social and physical sciences in order to ensure weather forecasts and warnings help people make better decisions to stay safe and thrive. I am currently doing a PhD on decision-making in the UK weather warning process.

I am especially interested in communication that encourages behavioural response, with a particular focus on equipping people to prepare for and respond to extreme and impactful weather that is being exacerbated by our changing climate.

Key topic areas of research or interest:

• Decision-science
• Cognitive biases
• Behavioural response
• Understanding of probabilistic information and uncertainty
• Risk communication
• Contextual bias
• Expertise
• Extreme and impactful weather, including health impacts, with a particular focus on PTSD resulting from natural disasters
• The psychology of weather

Publications:

The Psychology of Weather Forecasts

For the love of weather

Belief Bias & Extreme Weather

Davies, P., Fowler, H. J., Roberts, H., White, C. J., Youngman, M., & Rogers, D. P. (2025). The changing role of operational meteorology towards a transdisciplinary approach to future weather and climate services. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences, 383(2302), 20240535. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsta.2024.0535

Pagano, T. C., Casati, B., Landman, S., Loveday, N., Taggart, R., Ebert, E. E., Khanarmuei, M., Jensen, T. L., Mittermaier, M., Roberts, H., Willington, S., Roberts, N., Sowko, M., Strassberg, G., Kluepfel, C., Bullock, T. A., Turner, D. D., Pappenberger, F., Osborne, N., & Noble, C. (2024). Challenges of Operational Weather Forecast Verification and Evaluation. Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 105(4), E789–E802. https://doi.org/10.1175/BAMS-D-22-0257.1

Davies, P., Fowler, H. J., Roberts, H., White, C. J., Youngman, M., & Rogers, D. P. (2025). The changing role of operational meteorology towards a transdisciplinary approach to future weather and climate services. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences, 383(2302), 20240535. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsta.2024.0535

Macholl, J. D., Roberts, H., Steptoe, H., Sun, S., Angus, M., Davenport, C., Luscombe, W., Rolker, H. B., Pope, E. C. D., Dawkins, L. C., Munday, G., Giles, D., Lam, T., Deutloff, J., Champion, A. J., Bloomfield, H. C., Mendes, J., Speight, L., Bradshaw, C. D., & Wyatt, F. (2024). A collaborative hackathon to investigate climate change and extreme weather impacts in justice and insurance settings. Weather, wea.4560. https://doi.org/10.1002/wea.4560

Roberts, H. (2011). The 150th Anniversary of the first public weather forecast. Weather, 66(8), 221–222. https://doi.org/10.1002/wea.848