Dr David Wratt is Chief Scientist, Climate, at New Zealand's National Institute of Water & Atmospheric Research. He is also the Director of the New Zealand Climate Change Centre, which is a collaboration between New Zealand’s nine Crown Research Institutes and three of the New Zealand Universities. He is an Adjunct Professor in the Climate Change Research Institute at Victoria University, Wellington. David has a PhD in Atmospheric Physics and has carried out research in the USA, Australia and New Zealand on climate and meteorology. His present scientific interests include climate variability and change (science, impacts, adaptation); climate observations, mapping and hazards; and climate science applications. Topics he worked on earlier in his career included mesoscale and mountain meteorology, boundary layer meteorology, atmospheric dispersion of pollutants, and ionospheric physics. David is a Vice-Chair of Working Group 1 of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change). He is a Companion of the Royal Society of New Zealand, and in 2012 he was awarded the Queens Service Order for services to science.