Met Office Academic Partnership
The University of Birmingham is part of the Met Office Academic Partnership, working collaboratively with seven other leading universities to maintain and expand the UK’s world-class role in meteorology and climate science.
The Met Office Academic Partnership combines top scientific research from the Met Office with eight leading UK universities to tackle the challenges set out in the 2022 Met Office ‘Research and Innovation Strategy'. The initiative builds on existing weather and climate science research and extends collaboration to sectors like health, technology, AI, and social sciences creating a network to deliver advanced science for the Met Office and the wider research community.
The University of Birmingham is involved in four key research themes which are supported by the Birmingham Institute for Sustainability and Climate Action, the Institute for Interdisciplinary Data Science and AI, and other university departments. The goal is to create a cross-disciplinary network that collaborates on key scientific areas and aligns research efforts across sectors.
Our research themes
Hazard to decision-making
Hazard to decision-making
This theme focuses on expanding and improving Met Office services for stakeholders’ risk-based decision-making by working with users, social scientists, behavioural scientists, financial impact experts and engineers to gain an increased understanding of the impacts of hazards and to develop better impact-based services.
Theme leads:
PhD researchers
Sophie Feltz - Temporal-Spatial Clustering of Extreme Extra-tropical Cyclones in a Changing Climate (Supervisors: Gregor Leckebusch and Andrew Quinn).
Fusing Simulation with Data Sciences
Fusing Simulation with Data Sciences
Harnessing the power of Data Sciences to push the frontiers of weather and climate science and services. The Data Sciences Strategic Framework 2022-2027 outlines how we will achieve our goal. Arranged under the three pillars of capabilities, people and partners, it presents activities that develop, support and maintain an enabling environment wherein the use of Data Sciences in the weather and climate endeavour.
Theme Lead:
PhD researchers
Peiyuan Zhao - Structure preserving neural networks for GENERIC formulation (Supervisor: Xiaocheng Shang)
Advancing Observations
Advancing Observations
Deliver a step change in observational capability to close the most pressing capability gaps, realising the value of third party and opportunistic observations to address the growing need for fine scale weather observations.
Further enhance global observations for weather and climate applications through our contributions supporting and implementing the WIGOS Vision, the WMO Data Policy and associated activities.
Theme Leads:
PhD researchers
Matt Fry - Crowdsourced observations: a pathway to better heat hazard warnings? (Supervisors: Lee Chapman and Francis Pope).
Capturing Environmental Complexity
Capturing Environmental Complexity
To pioneer new and improved impact-based forecast services and advice on global climate change mitigation, extend our environmental prediction capability with a focus on cities, air quality, the water cycle, and carbon and nitrogen cycles.
Theme Leads:
PhD Researchers
Eugene McGee - The role of Urban Forest Strategies (UFS) in climate resilient urban forests (Supervisors: Emma Feranti).