The Met Office Academic Partnership (MOAP) is a collaboration of the Met Office with eight universities from across the UK. MOAP aims to ‘fuse the best of UK science to build resilience to high-impact weather events and climate change’. A key objective of MOAP is to draw on expertise from outside the Met Office to support strategic research and innovation priorities and to build a cluster of research excellence. In particular, we are keen to involve researchers from health, technology and social sciences, and to build cross-disciplinary collaborations and approaches.

The University of Bristol has a strong history of collaborative research with the Met Office and formally became a MOAP partner in 2020. The University’s world-leading expertise in climate hazards and risks, including severe flooding, storm surges, tropical cyclones and heat waves, provides comprehensive and robust evidence needed for decision making.

In 2022, the partnership expanded to support more Met Office research and innovation priorities. Dr Matt Palmer says

“We are particularly interested to learn from, and collaborate on, developments in supercomputing and Artificial Intelligence. Bristol’s data science expertise also supports us to provide tools and services to users and their climate modelling capability feeds into our fundamental research programmes. This helps us to continue to push boundaries.”

Dr Palmer adds

“On a personal level, I chose to partner with the University of Bristol because it is an internationally recognised centre of excellence. For example, Bristol’s strong expertise and capability in flood modelling allows us to link the Met Office sea-level projections to societal impacts and adaptation planning. Bristol is also a vibrant multi-cultural city and an exciting place to work and engage with students.”

Over the last two years MOAP has built an active community of researchers from across climate science and health disciplines. The group joined the discussion at the 2021 COP26 in Glasgow, provided evidence to a parliamentary committee inquiry, and most recently carried out a structured survey of expertise to draw together this wealth of knowledge. The findings of the expert survey, to be published later this year, will provide a vital overview of the impact of changing UK weather and climate for health.

The key priority for MOAP is to translate weather and climate information into societal benefits and inform decision-making. MOAP will look to exploit their research strengths in Hydrology, Climate and Health, and Marine systems and develop new research on weather and climate science for Africa. Over the next few years the team at Bristol will explore the potential for AI in climate science and its wider research, and continue to make strong contributions to both UK and international assessment of climate risks, impacts and adaptation planning.

Dr Matt Palmer is Lead Scientist for Marine Observations at the Met Office and also an Associate Professor in the School of Earth Sciences at the University of Bristol. His expertise in ocean observations, climate modelling, Earth’s energy budget and sea level rise has informed both UK and international policy-relevant climate change assessments. He led the sea level projections work for the 2018 UK National Climate Projections (UKCP18), which informs government planning and guidance on climate change. He was selected to be a lead author on the 2021 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) that provides the science basis for international climate negotiations (e.g. COP28).

Dr Palmer is also the Co-Chair of the Bristol MOAP working alongside Prof Dann Mitchell, Met Office Chair in Climate Hazards, School of Geographical Sciences, to develop areas of research strength and bring together colleagues from across a wide range of subjects to share knowledge and expertise. Having joint employment at both the Met Office and University of Bristol has aided him to build strong collaborative relationships across both organisations.