Francis Tam's research focuses on the dynamics of weather and climate affecting Hong Kong/GBA/South China, such as tropical cyclones, convective storms and heat waves. The urban environment can affect strongly how their impacts are manifested within the city, which aroused his interest in urban meteorology. A climate dynamicist by training, Francis does research on the large-scale general circulation- El Niño, tropical air-sea interaction and monsoon variability. He is particularly interested in atmospheric science problems across scales. His group uses earth system models (e.g. those from CMIP6), regional (atmosphere-ocean coupled) models (WRF/WRF-UCM; WRF-ROMS-SWAN), variable-resolution global models (MPAS/MPAS-UCM) to tackle these (related) problems.