Met Office Hadley Centre Climate Programme for 2021-2024

Climate Programme for 2021 and beyond

The MOHCCP will build on the success of previous programmes and reflect the changing demands of climate science.

The 2021 programme:

• Focus on monitoring and understanding weather and climate hazards, supporting decision makers to manage current and future risks.
• Informed the development of strategies for lowering greenhouse gas emissions to avoid the most dangerous impacts of climate change.
• Assessed the risk of abrupt, potentially irreversible, Earth system changes (including tipping points).
• Detailed how global warming translates into local-scale changes in future climate projections. This will focus on weather and climate extremes, such as windstorms, heat waves, and coastal and inland flooding events.

Met Office Hadley Centre Climate Programme key questions

There are four key questions that the UK Government has agreed the climate science community needs to answer over the next five years and beyond.

1. Current weather and climate risks

• What are the current weather and climate risks in the UK and globally?

2. Future weather and climate risks

• What are the future risks we face from weather and climate, under a range of scenarios?

3. Avoiding the impacts of climate change

• How can we avoid the most dangerous impacts of climate change?

4. Different amounts of future warming

• What are the impacts and opportunities of limiting warming to different warming targets?

Supercomputer capacity for the Met Office Hadley Centre Climate Programme

In 2022, new supercomputer infrastructure will provide greater capacity and performance, supporting our weather and climate operations and research.

This new supercomputer capability helped realise the full potential of the Met Office’s global expertise in climate science to help ensure government, industry and communities are better prepared for a changing climate.

The benefits of our supercomputer capability include:

• Enhanced climate monitoring capability of greenhouse gases, and attributing climate changes to causes.
• Monitoring of key climate indicators, including past, present and early warning of future changes.
• Improved quantification of global carbon budgets to assess feasibility of pathways, in line with the 2015 Paris Agreement.
• Advanced seasonal to decadal predictions to aid risk-based decision making and planning.
• Revised climate projections to inform mitigation and adaptation planning.
• Impact-based projections for climate resilient pathways, which will inform government policy as part of the UK’s fight against climate change, and its efforts to reach net zero by 2050.
• Core infrastructure contributing to the National Climate Capability, making data and knowledge more accessible, relevant and usable for policy makers and planners.