On 1 November 1965, three giant cooling towers at Ferrybridge power station in West Yorkshire collapsed during a gale. No one was killed but the incident triggered widespread alarm. The towers had been built to withstand far greater wind forces but had nevertheless disintegrated. Why had this occurred and what other buildings were at risk across the UK?
To find the answer, the Central Electricity Generating Board asked Julian Hunt, a young British engineer on its research staff, to investigate. Hunt began to analyse the wind force distribution on the towers and realised these had not been adequately accounted for in their design. These flaws led him to develop theories about turbulence that are now used in the construction and design of any large obstruction – such as a tower or skyscraper – that could significantly alter wind patterns, creating unexpected gusts and dangerous downdrafts.
His ideas also became cornerstones of modern turbulence research and have become essential in describing atmospheric and oceanic dynamics, and understanding events ranging from the dispersion of leaks from undersea oil wells to the behaviour of volcanic ash.
Hunt, who has died aged 84, went on to publish many influential papers in this field and established an imposing reputation in meteorology that led to him being made director general of the Met Office in 1992 and to his appointment in 1999 as professor of climate modelling at University College London. “Julian was a pioneer in applying fluid mechanics and turbulence to real-world problems and played a key role in linking the science with societal needs,” said his former UCL colleague Professor Ian Eames.
Another striking demonstration of his scientific expertise was Hunt’s submission to the 2005 appeal by Sion Jenkins against his conviction for murdering his foster daughter Billie-Jo in Hastings in 1997. Blood spatters found on Jenkins’ clothing were consistent with an attack by him on Billie-Jo, the Crown had argued. At his appeal, his defence maintained the blood had been exhaled when Jenkins moved Billie-Jo after discovering her body. Hunt’s evidence – based on his knowledge on the behaviour of fluids in motion – provided support for this claim and helped secure Jenkins’ acquittal.
Julian was born in Ootacamund in the Nilgiri Hills of India, the son of Pauline (nee Garnett) and Roland Hunt. His father, then a district officer in the Indian civil service (and later a British diplomat in senior Commonwealth postings), had a house surrounded by papayas and mango trees, where Julian and his younger brother Simon grew up. (Another brother, Clive, and two sisters, Tessa and Perdita, were born later.) “A cow was brought in the mornings to provide milk for breakfast and the snake charmer was brought in to sit cross-legged on the drawing-room floor and entertain us with his swaying cobra,” Hunt recalled later. “Elephant rides were a special treat.”
At Indian independence in 1947, the family returned to the UK, where Julian attended the Dragon school in Oxford and Westminster school in London. His education was interrupted in 1954 when he was hospitalised with a tumour pressing on his spine. After an operation, he was put in a ward shared with war veterans. “Living with these people was an experience that led to my interest in leftwing politics,” he said later.
He studied mechanical sciences at Trinity College, Cambridge (where he later became a fellow), and began postgraduate research that was focused on the interaction between magnetic fields and flowing metals, in particular mercury. Thus began his lifelong interest in the behaviour of liquid materials and turbulence.
In 1965, he married Marylla Shephard, a textile designer and future landscape architect. The couple travelled to the US after Julian was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to carry out research at Cornell University. At the time anti-Vietnam protests and Black rights campaigns were sweeping America, and the couple’s involvement in these movements was crucial in cementing Hunt’s socialist beliefs, which crystallised on his return in 1968 to the UK. “I had been so appalled by what I had been seeing of the ethnic divide in the US that I threw myself into local politics in Britain, firstly in London and later in Cambridge,” he recalled.
Having worked for two years for the Central Electricity Research Laboratories in Surrey, while living in south-west London, he returned to Cambridge in 1970 as a lecturer in applied mathematics and engineering. Combining his research with his political activities, in 1972 he became leader of the Labour group on Cambridge city council. In 1991, by now professor of fluid mechanics at Cambridge, he was asked if he would be interested in applying to be head of the Met Office, a post that he held from 1992 to 1997.
He was created a life peer in 2000 and served on numerous House of Lords committees where, said his friend and Labour colleague Lady (Margaret) Jay of Paddington, “he provided a very strong scientific voice”. Among the issues that increasingly concerned him were the dangers posed by climate change triggered by increasing fossil fuel emissions.
Hunt retired from UCL in 2008 and from the Lords in 2021, and in later life, his son Tristram said, was “happiest when floating amongst the swirling eddies of freezing rock-pools under the Languedoc sun”.
He is survived by Marylla and their three children, Tristram, Jemima and Matilda.
• Julian Charles Roland Hunt, Lord Hunt of Chesterton, meteorologist, born 5 September 1941; died 20 April 2026
