Major research programmes create lasting legacy
Between 2019 and 2025, the Met Office co-led four interdisciplinary research programmes from the UK Government’s Strategic Priorities Fund (SPF).
The SPF programmes offered a unique opportunity to collaborate with UK Research & Innovation councils and to fund research into strategic government priority areas in line with our Research and Innovation Strategy.
A collaborative approach
With UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), we jointly led the £18.7m UK Climate Resilience Programme (UKCR) to quantify UK climate risk and build resilience, producing usable outputs for decision-making.
We also co-led the £42.5m Clean Air Programme across two waves with the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) to tackle indoor and outdoor air pollution and its effects on human health. This included the impacts on vulnerable groups such as children and older people.
Additionally, with the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), we jointly led the Exascale Computing ALgorithms & Infrastructures Benefiting UK Research (ExCALIBUR) Programme. The £47.5m programme intended to redesign high priority simulation codes and algorithms to fully harness the power of future supercomputers.
The diverse collaborations built through the programmes enabled sharing of skills, expertise and capabilities for the advancement of weather and climate science and the development of new products and services. They are helping to ensure we continue to meet the needs of our customers and stakeholders.
So, what differences have the programmes made to the UK? In the remaining of this article, we will highlight a selection of examples of new collaborations formed through the programmes and their value.
Assessing climate risk and improving resilience
The UKCR Programme saw new connections made across disciplines, helping to build a transdisciplinary community for maximising research value, impact and legacy.
Through the programme, a new study was led by the Met Office to quantify the risk of overheating in 20,000 schools in England. Researchers worked with the Department of Education (DfE) to quantify the increasing overheating risk for schools from climate change.
Following the successful output of the UKCR Climate Service Pilot on Improving Coastal Resilience, a relocatable sea level tool was built to provide global and local sea level projections. Since its launch, the Met Office Projecting Future Sea Level (ProFSea) tool has been used to inform adaptation decisions, increasing resilience to future climate risk.
Overall UKCR helped us to better understand and quantify climate risks, and climate services to help the UK deal with these risks. It also provided lessons on interdisciplinary working on climate related issues. These lessons have informed a new project led by Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) and Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), in which the Met Office is a partner, on Maximising UK Adaptation to Climate Change (MACC).
Read this blog to learn more about the key successes and the impact of the UKCR programme.
Harnessing air quality expertise for impact and action
Under the Clean Air Programme, we have worked with partners to respond to the challenges of air pollution, and to aid policy decisions around air quality and health. We have supported the development of cutting-edge air quality tools and resources designed to educate groups, help understand emissions, combat poor air quality and inform policies.
We partnered with Global Action Plan to develop a set of high quality, curriculum linked schools’ resources on air quality. The materials explained what air pollution is, how it impacts people’s health, and what they can do to protect themselves and others.
Additionally, the Met Office Air Quality Data Portal acts as a central hub for tools and resources developed for the air quality and health impact sectors, and as a forum for researchers to share and collaborate on research. Using data from the UK Air Quality Reanalysis, the portal provides monthly and yearly averages of surface pollution levels at locations throughout the UK from 2003-2019.
Clean Air projects led by partners have included the development of the UK-Emission Modelling System (UK-EMS), the Indoor Air Quality Emissions and Modelling System (IAQ-EMS), and the Multi Model Air Quality System for Health Research (MAQS-Health) System.
UK-EMS provides a framework for emission modelling to enable researchers to better estimate existing pollutant levels and evaluate future scenarios from UK national to street level. IAQ-EMS enables a better understanding of the indoor air quality environment to inform building design and policy. MAQS-Health simulates roadside air pollution enabling researchers to calculate exposure levels and inform health impact studies.
This work, along with our wider air quality research, has helped to lay the foundations for a stronger clean air community of interacting researchers, practitioners, and policymakers.
Read this blog exploring how the UK's air quality landscape is changing
Advancing high-performance simulation science
The ExCALIBUR Programme kept UK research and development at the forefront of high-performance simulation science. Through innovative algorithmic development, it aimed to redesign the UK’s largest simulation codes to fully harness the power of future supercomputers across scientific and engineering applications. Such applications included our own field of weather and climate predictions, as well as turbulence modelling, nuclear fusion and high-energy particles, and other cross-cutting activities.
Research and scientific software engineers are key to the success of designing and developing simulation codes. As part of the knowledge integration aspect of the programme, ExCALIBUR commissioned a landscape review focused on the role of research and scientific software engineers to help prepare for the arrival of exascale machines. In line with this review, we developed an established pool of redeployable scientific software engineers, allowing us to exploit their breadth of experience and adaptability to new skills.
ExCALIBUR also led to new partnerships and reinvigorated existing ones. As part of our Next Generation Modelling Systems Programme, we collaborated with the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) to design atmospheric modelling systems for use on future supercomputing architectures. This work included the development of a tool called PSyclone, which automatically generates and optimises computer modelling code for a range of different supercomputer architectures. It enables us to become more agile to ever-changing computer designs, so we can make better use of future supercomputers and do more effective scientific research.
However, some key marine systems models used for weather prediction and climate projections didn’t support the use of the tool. So, a subsequent partnership was led by the STFC’s Hartree Centre through ExCALIBUR. It involved expertise from the National Oceanography Centre, the National Centre for Atmospheric Science and the Met Office. Together a novel solution was developed, allowing the ocean modelling systems code to be used on any chosen hardware. This achievement enabled the marine systems to utilise advancements in computer hardware, including ultra-powerful exascale computers. It is helping to ensure the UK capability in weather and climate modelling remains at the forefront of the field.
This article was published in March 2025.