Dr. Kent, NOC Scientist, Honored for Climate Research

The UK National Oceanography Center’s (NOC) Dr Elizabeth Kent has been awarded an MBE, for services to tracking global temperatures, recognizing her decades of research into improving historical sea surface temperature records.

The award was announced in King Charles III’s New Year Honors list, which recognises the outstanding achievements of British citizens, recommended by the prime minister following an independent assessment process.

For over three decades, Liz, who is Associate Head of the Marine Physics and Ocean Climate group at NOC, has performed research that underpins development of long-term global surface temperature records, helping to make them more accurate and consistent - crucial to the ability of the international science community to detect and describe human-induced climate change.

This research, and the datasets built upon it, underpin climate assessments such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Assessment Reports, used by every policymaker, campaigner or researcher who wants to know or to show how the ocean and climate is changing.

Liz is part of a team at NOC working on historical marine surface observations. She has spent years studying the details of the observations, how they were made, recorded and stored. This insight helps reveal the true variations in marine