JWCRP

Joint Weather & Climate Research Programme

The major new Joint Weather & Climate Research Programme (JWCRP) is a joint programme between NERC and the Met Office. The aim of this programme is to ensure that the UK maintains and strengthens its leading international position in climate science, and hence in weather and climate forecasting and provision of advice for climate policy. Find out more at jwcrp.org.uk.

The objectives of the programme are to:

  • ensure that the UK has access to internationally competitive tools for forecasting weather and climate, and their impacts;
  • enable closer collaboration between NERC and the Met Office by working to eliminate existing barriers;
  • develop new activities to address critical gaps in existing national portfolio of weather and climate research;
  • develop mechanisms to promote more effective pull-through of research results into improved weather and climate forecasts

Current research foci are:

  • Representation of the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) in the tropical Pacific
  • Evaluation of the global precipitation distribution across the HadGEM1 and HadGEM3 model families and CMIP5 models

 

Higher-resolution HadGEM3

UJCC and HiGEM have shown the importance of studying the climate system with GCMs that are able to credibly resolve the finer elements of the global circulation, as well as phenomena such as ENSO, tropical and extra-tropical cyclones and ocean eddies.

HighResCL (High-Resolution CLimate Modelling) is the name of our JWCRP programme that aims to build upon past expertise in high-resolution climate modelling to construct a GCM based on HadGEM3 in the atmosphere and NEMO in the ocean. Presently, the atmospheric horizontal resolution of different versions of HadGEM3 is in the range between N216 (60km at 50°N) and N512 (25km at 50°N); with 85 levels in the vertical. The ocean component of HadGEM3 has a horizontal resolution of 0.25° and 75 vertical levels. This is expected to improve the representation of the diurnal cycle of sea surface temperature (SST) and its impact on atmosphere-ocean coupling.

 

HRCM scientists leading JWCRP

Leading the JWRCP team are Malcolm Roberts at Met Office Hadley Centre and Pier Luigi Vidale and Reinhard Schiemann at NCAS-Climate, University of Reading.