UK-Japan Climate Collaboration

The UK-Japan Climate Collaboration (UJCC) is an international collaborative research project between the United Kingdom (Natural Environmental Research Council and UK Met Office Hadley Centre) and Japan (Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology - JAMSTEC).

The aim of the UJCC project (2005-2008) is to exploit the power of the Earth Simulator to produce world-leading climate simulations. The enhanced resolution models will allow unprecedented fidelity of simulation, and allow many emergent phenomena to be resolved. The science of the project will then be to understand how the increased resolution changes the large scale mean climate, consider whether the emergent processes are therefore essential to produce reliable climate models, and consider if these processes can be parameterized in lower resolution models, or if their importance is enough to drive model resolution to increase. 

Models developed within UJCC, capable of resolving weather and climate processes, should allow us to improve the current generation of climate models, by providing guidance as to the quality of existing parametrisations. Computer simulation has in fact proven to be a practical and useful scientific methodology for making predictions concerning global environmental change. These simulations are providing unprecedented opportunities to study weather systems and their relationship with regional and global climate variability. A fundamental component of the collaboration is working alongside Japanese scientists at the Earth Simulator Centre and at the University of Tokyo, who have already developed and deployed models at high- and ultra-high-resolution to solve climate problems. Intercomparison of models and formulations at comparable resolutions allows us to answer questions about the suitability of current models for producing climate information at the regional scale.

UK scientists, residing in Japan for the duration of this three-year project, have successfully ported the Hadley Centre's current climate model, HadGEM, to the Earth Simulator supercomputer, one of the most powerful on Earth. After developing a range of high-resolution model versions, UJCC scientists have performed climate simulations with unprecedented detail, enabling the study of important processes, such as ENSO, and of climate extremes, such as cyclones, typhoons, hurricanes. The UK portion of the project joins teams from the Met Office Hadley Centre (Exeter) and NCAS-Climate (University of Reading).

To find out more, please visit the UJCC website.