Met Office Academic Partnership: advancing weather and climate science

The University of Edinburgh, through EPCC, has recently joined the Met Office Academic Partnership (MOAP), a cluster of research excellence consisting of eight UK universities that is aimed at advancing weather and climate research.

MOAP brings together the Met Office and leading UK institutions in weather and climate science, as well as health, supercomputing, artificial intelligence, and the social sciences.

The Partnership has invested in jointly funded Chairs at UK universities, with EPCC’s Professor Michèle Weiland appointed to the Joint Chair for the University of Edinburgh. Each Joint Chair will act as the leader for the research programmes and related activities within their institution, and across the Partnership.

Supercomputing and data science expertise

EPCC will use its supercomputing and data science expertise to help the Met Office deliver its next-generation numerical weather modelling system, and exploit the data that results from it. EPCC’s experience running the ARCHER2 UK National Supercomputing Service and designing the Edinburgh International Data Facility (EIDF) gives it a unique breadth of experience to support the University’s research with the Met Office.

A key goal of the Partnership is to provide an outstanding environment to develop the science leaders of tomorrow in this very challenging area of research that is of strategic importance. This will include sponsorship of student placements, internships and staff secondments, both at the Met Office and the University.

Previous collaborations

EPCC has a long track record of working with the Met Office, starting more than 30 years ago with the parallelisation of the Unified Model, the numerical weather prediction and climate modelling suite used in production at the Met Office on a daily basis. More recent collaborations involved the optimisation and modernisation of modelling codes to support running on more powerful high-performance computing systems, and enable far larger and higher-resolution simulations than previously possible.

MOAP brings together UCL, University of Bristol, University of Exeter, University of Leeds, University of Oxford, University of Reading, University of Edinburgh and University of Birmingham.

Met Office Academic Partnerships