Our new Supercomputer will reach peak performance in 2017, making it one of the fastest in the world. It will enable us
Met Office Hadley Centre Global partnerships Since its foundation in 1990 , the Met Office Hadley Centre (MOHC) has been recognised as a global partner of choice for climate science and services. Through our years of pioneering research our scientists have been working alongside international researchers from at least 480 institutions and 113 countries.
World-leading research The MOHC has been at the forefront of climate research. It has: • Contributed to all five of the Assessment Reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) with 30 Lead or Coordinating Lead Authors, 115 Contributors and 147 Reviewers. • Published more than 1,800 peer-reviewed articles in the scientific literature since 1990, with 149 articles published in 2015. MOHC publications have a high impact – having been cited more than 110,000 times. Our high number of citations per paper led to the MOHC being named as the world’s number one geosciences research centre in the most recent survey from Times Higher Education Report.* * Data provided by Thomson Reuters from its Essential Science Indicators, January 1999–June 2009
Figure 1. Global distribution of MOHC partnerships. Bubble size represents the number of papers that the Met Office has co-authored in each country.
“The Hadley Centre’s climate model is a high point of British science. In speeches I have described the work of the Met Office Hadley Centre as the jewel in the crown of British science – and our science is amongst the best in the world.” Sir David King, Foreign Secretary’s Special Representative on Climate Change 200
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This partnership approach to furthering understanding of our global climate system has played a pivotal role in providing an evidence base for global decision-making.
0 2015
Figure 2. Peer-reviewed articles from 1990 - 2015
High-performance computing Our new Supercomputer will reach peak performance in 2017, making it one of the fastest in the world. It will enable us to maximise the benefits from the next generation of weather and climate models, bringing an estimated £2 billion of benefits to the UK over four years. Science benefits will include: • High resolution climate modelling and more complete Earth System models to better assess future impacts of a changing climate at a regional scale, especially from high impact weather. This will help the UK and the world make strategic decisions to safeguard lives and infrastructure. • Increased understanding of risk through using multiple model-runs. This can help the UK better respond to the risks of severe or disruptive weather, such as thunderstorms or extreme winds. • Releasing the potential of existing science and enable further developments through collaborative research.
The Supercomputer will be able to do more than 14,000 trillion calculations a second. That’s more than 2 million calculations for every person on Earth, every second. The upgraded supercomputer was funded by the Department for Business, Innovation & Skills.
Achievement highlights Developed global datasets for climate monitoring.
Advanced the detection and attribution of human influence on extreme weather.
Example: HadCRUT4, jointly produced by the University of East Anglia, is one of the leading global temperature datasets used by researchers around the world, providing monthly surface temperatures since 1850.
Example: MOHC scientists have been at the forefront of developing techniques for attribution and have been heavily involved in the annual Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society report, Explaining Extreme Events from a Climate Perspective.
Pioneered techniques for seasonal to decadal forecasting across the world.
Developed state of the art climate and earth system models.
Example: The new high-resolution MOHC decadal climate prediction system shows that skilful prediction of the the North Atlantic Oscillation, a key driver of seasonal climate in North America and Europe, is possible more than a year ahead.
Example: The first generation UK Earth System Model, developed in partnership with the Natural Environment Research Council, and representing complex processes across the climate system, is nearing operational use.
Generated projections of future climate change for government policy advice. Example: Met Office climate models were used to perform experiments across the CMIP5 project, providing projections of future change used by the IPCC.
Work featured in this publication has been supported by the Joint UK BEIS/Defra Met Office Hadley Centre Climate Programme (GA01101). Produced by the Met Office. Met Office and the Met Office logo are registered trademarks. © Crown Copyright 2016, Met Office 16/0844
