Christophe Sarran, Senior Health Research Scientist, Met Office

Christophe Sarran, a Senior Health Research Scientist at the Met Office, talks about how his work helps to protect public health and quality of life, and how the Met Office is much more than just the weather forecasts we see on the TV.

My first job was working in the medical industry and then the NHS where I acquired quite a few skills and my own patents around statistics and analysing healthcare data — and how to implement this analysis to help patients.

I was looking for a new job when I came across the Met Office, who were looking for somebody with exactly the sort of skills I had.

Christophe Sarran

I’m now a senior health research scientist at the Met Office within the UK Climate Resilience team and my role is to gather data sets from the health sector and from weather and climate.

Then, I’ll analyse everything to look at the impact of weather and climate on people’s health and find ways of preventing those impacts from happening.

I also assist other public health sector organisations in any prevention and outbreak investigations.

Impacts of climate and weather on health

There are two main sets of impact relationships.

One is what we call non-communicable diseases. That’s the direct impact of hot or cold; air quality; or pollen. These can be easily mapped out to some of the services Met Office provides in terms of heatwave warnings, cold weather warnings, UV index and air quality forecasts.

Then, we also work closely with public health organisations looking at infectious diseases such as salmonella, E. coli, legionnaires’ disease and, at the time, Covid-19 was another thing we looked at.

These infectious diseases have more complex links with weather and climate. For instance, E. coli is thought to be more prevalent when there’s been a period of drought and then heavy rainfall.

Working at the Met Office

I come across quite a few people who don’t realise the breadth of things we do at the Met Office.

The Met Office works as part of a Health Protection Research Unit with public health and academic partners. That has a public engagement committee with a number of people who attend regular meetings where we present findings and seek feedback.

So, we do have mechanisms for more public engagement, but the majority of people probably won’t be aware of everything that we do.

I often host tours of the Met Office, like for community groups and they are generally quite flabbergasted by the huge breadth of our work. It’s not only health. We’re involved in aviation, military, road surface temperatures, and, as another example, looking at leaf fall on railway lines, which causes problems for the running of train services. There’s quite a lot we do that is not immediately obvious.

Being a public scientist

I think one of the key motivations for me, and a lot of my colleagues at the Met Office, is that this is a place where we can do interesting science.

Nothing is perfect, like the pay could be better and every workplace has its annoyances.

But, despite all that, I do find my current role really rewarding and I am attracted to public service and helping to make a difference.

I’m always very satisfied when I’ve got public health colleagues who tell me the data I provided was really good and useful; that they’ve been able to do a study that will strengthen health protection, and that they wouldn’t have been able to do it without me.

That’s what I’m here for: helping to save lives and helping people’s quality of life in a very real way.