Paul Mason is a physicist with an international reputation based on his research in several important areas of geophysical fluid dynamics and dynamical meteorology. His earliest work includes elegant laboratory studies of thermal convection in rotating fluids, flows due to moving heat sources and forces on bodies moving through rotating fluids.

He later undertook the development of new boundary instrumentation and directed a series of major field studies whose measurements provided critical advancement to the understanding and representation of boundary layer processes in numerical weather prediction and climate.

More recently, he has carried out theoretical and numerical studies of the influence of topography on turbulent boundary layer flow and pioneering numerical work on large eddy simulation in planetary boundary layers.