Exploiting Ensembles NWP Forecasts at the Met Office: From Science to Products and Services

The Met Office has been developing ensemble-based NWP capabilities for many years and is moving to an ensemble-only NWP system, for both global and UK convective-scale forecasting, by 2026. This move will enable us to deliver innovative forecast products (particularly in terms of risk of high-impact weather events), building on earlier successes such as weather regime forecast tools (e.g. DECIDER), probabilistic post-processing approaches (such as IMPROVER), and the probabilistic National Severe Weather Warning Service, to name a few.

However, the value of these ensembles-based systems is not fully reaching all our products and services, and the full benefits remain to be realised, despite the significant investment made on running these systems on our HPC (High Performance Computing). Acknowledging this challenge, the Met Office has launched the “Ensembles Exploitation Strategic Action”, a two-year flagship project that aims to: (i) focus priorities: from underpinning model research and development through operational tools/systems and into users, products and services, and (ii) pull-though the benefits of such capability investment. The Met Office is a service-based science organisation so this action crosses everything we do from science research right through operational tools and systems to delivering services to support user decision-making.

In this talk, I will present the increasing efforts to place ensemble-based capabilities at the heart of what we do, connecting research and the need for high quality, actionable information, as the basis for our products and services, particularly in terms of risk of high impact weather. I will cover aspects of: (i) model development informed by ensemble performance, (ii) the development of ensemble-based tools (and real-world examples of successes) in support of decision-making, (iii) the novel exploitation of additional information in the ensembles for different applications and users (including operational meteorologists), (iv) development of training for staff right across the organisation to give them the knowledge and confidence to use ensembles effectively, and (v) overcoming cultural barriers.