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Met Office Academic Partnership welcomes new universities

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The Met Office is joining forces with two more leading UK universities to tackle the key research challenges related to weather prediction and a changing climate.

The Met Office Academic Partnership (MOAP) is a cluster of research excellence that brings together the Met Office and leading UK Universities in weather and climate science, to advance the science and skill of weather and climate prediction. As a founding member of the partnership, the University of Leeds is delighted to welcome the University of Bristol and University College London to MOAP, and look forward to working together as an expanded, more diverse and more powerful partnership.

Professor Stephen Belcher, Met Office Chief Scientist, said: “I am delighted that UCL and University of Bristol are to join the Met Office Academic Partnership. They bring a wealth of talent and expertise to this thriving partnership that will ensure the Met Office delivers its research and innovation strategy and improves weather and climate science and services.”

More than 1000 scientific papers have been co-authored by MOAP with key scientific developments delivered through collaborations between MOAP scientists. However, over the last decade since MOAP was established, the nature of the science we undertake has changed. The Met Office is embracing machine learning and data sciences in its research and seeking to understand how weather and climate–related hazards impact our day-to-day lives and decisions. This increasing complexity has driven the expansion of MOAP.

People are key to the success of the MOAP and the partnership invests in the role of a Joint Chair at each partner University to provide scientific leadership.

Dr John Marsham, Met Office Joint-Chair at the University of Leeds, said: “Informing decision making has always been a core aim of weather and climate science, but as our climate changes, and the power of computing grows, there is both an ever growing urgency to bring science to real world decisions and new opportunities for data science.

“There is huge opportunity for collaboration, not only with Leeds Atmospheric and Climate Science, but with water@leeds, the Priestley International Centre for Climate and the Leeds Institute for Data Analytics.”

You can find out more about MOAP on the Met Office website and for more information on key collaborative projects, take a look at the following links: IMPALAGungHo, and Paracon .

Main image: Photo by Roger Bradshaw on Unsplash