The Met Office Academic Partnership (MOAP)
is a cluster of research excellence. It brings together the Met Office with the leading UK universities in weather and climate science through a formal collaboration to advance the science and skill of weather and climate prediction. As well as Oxford, the partnership includes the Universities of Exeter, Leeds and Reading and we also welcome the new members Bristol and UCL.
Future directions for Oxford’s contributions:
- Continue to lead and contribute to advanced remote sensing methods to obtain key observations of atmospheric composition, clouds and aerosols.
- Develop a quantitative, multidisciplinary approach to model complex climate interactions between the atmosphere, ocean, cryosphere and land surface.
- Develop innovative ways of applying probabilistic and stochastic approaches to the prediction of weather and climate: used for attribution studies and assessment of the risks to water resources, ecosystems and infrastructure systems.
These broad aims will be structured around 5 focal points:
- Remote sensing, radiation, clouds and aerosols
- Climate risks
- Oceans and climate
- Climate Dynamics and Predictability
- Africa
Some of these topics were identified on the basis of their complementarity with existing activity in the MOAP, but all were chosen to match the capacity of Oxford University to contribute at a high scientific level in partnership with Met Office collaborators. It will be evident that there is some synergy and overlap between these themes, which is inevitable in such a broad and diverse programme. It is also clear that these focal points should not constrain the scope of collaboration, which already extends beyond these topics and which we hope to expand further in future as partners in the MOAP.
Contacts
Oxford’s Partnership Coordinator: Prof Tim Woollings
Met Office lead: Dr Mike Bell
