Birmingham experts help to build resilience to high-impact weather events and climate change

A new partnership between leading British Universities and the Met Office will help to offset the increasing impacts of extreme weather and climate change.

Flooded house with cows on the porch

We must protect ourselves against the increasing impacts of extreme weather and climate change

Climate and weather experts at the University of Birmingham have been chosen to join a high-profile partnership between top British universities and the Met Office that will explore the increasing impacts of extreme weather and climate change.

The Met Office Academic Partnership (MOAP) aims to blend the research excellence of the Met Office and leading universities in order to advance the science and skill of weather and climate prediction.

The new partnership coincides with the development of two institutes at Birmingham focussed on Sustainability & Climate Action and Interdisciplinary Data Science & Artificial Intelligence. We look forward to combining our international expertise in these areas with the world-leading work of the Met Office.

Lee Chapman - Professor of Climate Resilience, University of Birmingham

Tackling the challenges of high-impact weather and climate can no longer be treated as a single discipline as it increasingly requires involvement from scientists in other sectors including health, technology, artificial intelligence, and the social sciences. MOAP brings together the best of UK scientific research to cover topics where the Met Office does not necessarily have acknowledged expertise.

Lee Chapman, Professor of Climate Resilience at the University of Birmingham, commented: “The new partnership coincides with the development of two institutes at Birmingham focussed on Sustainability & Climate Action and Interdisciplinary Data Science & Artificial Intelligence. We look forward to combining our international expertise in these areas with the world-leading work of the Met Office.”

There is an urgent need to understand the impacts of extreme weather and climate change and how these affect society. Temperature extremes are expected to increase in line with climate change, bringing potential impacts on health.

Gregor Leckebusch, Professor of Meteorology and Climatology at the University of Birmingham, commented: “In the future, we will see further, partly new or modified extreme events across the globe posing a substantial thread to societies. The University of Birmingham with its pioneering research across the full breadth of disciplines will help to tackle respective global challenges.”

Dr George Pankiewicz, Met Office Head of Science Partnership, commented: “A good topical example of how this programme is expected to make great advances is in the sphere of heat health. This summer saw temperature records broken across the UK and multiple heatwave events around the northern hemisphere - bringing disruption and societal impacts to many communities.

“The increasing frequency and intensity of heat events is something that humanity will have to increasingly adapt to. Scientists at the Met Office and elsewhere are building the body of research about these events, but we recognise that isn’t sufficient alone to help society rise to future challenges.”

The academic partnership unites researchers at the University of Birmingham with counterparts at UCL and the Universities of Bristol, Edinburgh, Exeter, Leeds, Oxford, and Reading. The collaboration has a number of workstreams and Birmingham experts will lend their expertise to work on fusing simulations with data sciences, capturing environmental complexity, hazards to decision making, and advancing observations.

Met Office Chief Scientist Professor Stephen Belcher commented: “Extreme weather events and climate change pose among the greatest risks facing humanity. Tackling them is an urgent and huge undertaking. The Met Office can’t do it alone – the Met Office Academic Partnership harnesses the best of UK research and will give us the best chance of coping with and adapting to future change.”

Notes for editors

  • For more information please contact Tony Moran, International Communications, Manager, University of Birmingham on t.moran@bham.ac.uk or alternatively, contact the Press Office out of hours on +44 (0)7789 921165.
  • The University of Birmingham is ranked amongst the world’s top 100 institutions. Its work brings people from across the world to Birmingham, including researchers, teachers and more than 8,000 international students from over 150 countries.