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Weather Experts Enjoy Climate of Co-operation
Weather Experts Enjoy Climate of Co-operation
Weather Experts Enjoy Climate of Co-operation
Stronger collaboration between Living With Environmental Change partners aims for climate forecasting at county level.
Farmers, planners and tourism businesses often lament the lack of information which could tell them how the climate will change at the scale of a single county. After all, long-term decisions are often taken at county level but climate projections are at the global, national or regional scales. Imagine how much more confident emergency planners or flood risk managers would be if their information was more precise. Now a Living With Environmental Change-accredited initiative enabling stronger collaboration between the Met Office and the Natural Environment Research Council aims to deliver that improvement.
The Joint Weather and Climate Research Programme is enabling hundreds of scientists at the two organisations to pool resources more effectively and so deliver significant improvements in the computer models underpinning their forecasting capabilities. Programme Manager Andy Parsons has a clear view of the potential:
“The Met Office and the Natural Environment Research Council have worked together productively for many years, but this represents a major step forward in aligning activities, eliminating overlap and maximising value for money.”
A shared computing platform means experts across both organisations can now collaborate to refine weather and climate models with unprecedented speed. Already, data and advice can be fed more quickly to policy-makers, who need this basic science to inform policy decisions on climate change and other issues.
Individual programme activities include development of a model that can generate better predictions of how trace gases and aerosols in the atmosphere will affect weather and climate patterns. Significant advances are also anticipated in ensuring models can run long-term projections for areas as small as a single county.
“The fundamental driver is the requirement to produce forecasts and predictions that really command confidence”, Andy Parsons concludes. “This programme aims to help meet that requirement head-on.”