Peter William Thorne is a climatologist and professor of physical geography in the Department of Geography, Maynooth University.^[1]

He graduated with a BSc in Environmental Sciences from the University of East Anglia in 1998, and a PhD from the School of Environmental Sciences in 2001.^[2] He previously worked at the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research and the National Climatic Data Center, and he was a senior scientist at the Nansen Environmental and Remote Sensing Center, Bergen, Norway.^[3][4] He is the chair of the International Surface Temperature Initiative which consists of an interdisciplinary effort to create a suite of improved Land Surface Air Temperature products to meet science needs and societal expectations in the era of climate services.^[5] Thorne is co-chair of the GCOS Working Group on the Global Climate Observing System Reference Upper Air Network (GRUAN),^[6] and he is also the project lead on the Horizon 2020 GAIA-CLIM project^[7] which aims to use such measurements to better characterise satellite measurements. He is one of the 831 Lead Authors^[8] of the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report.^[9]