The UK Met Office Environmental Monitoring and Response Centre (EMARC)—Contributing Towards UK Resilience to Natural Hazards, and Responding to International-Scale Events

The eruption of an Icelandic volcano in 2010 and the ensuing major disruption to European and trans-Atlantic air travel was the peak of a series of weather-related natural hazards which had impacted the UK in the preceding years. The aftermath of these events led to recognition within the UK resilience community that better co-ordination and integration of natural hazard response and advice across government agencies was needed.

In response, a multidisciplinary partnership of UK-based public sector organisations was formed, each with expertise in different aspects of natural hazards, with a view to improving UK resilience through taking a more collaborative and coordinated approach to predicting, responding to, and recovering from natural hazards. This was known as the Natural Hazards Partnership.

Central to the Met Office contribution to the partnership was the Environmental Monitoring and Response Centre (EMARC), located at Met Office Headquarters in Exeter, which became responsible for transforming much of the combined expertise of the Natural Hazards Partnership into operational services to be delivered to authorities and responders. This was in recognition of weather being the direct cause of many natural hazards, such as severe storms, or at least having a major influence on the development and impact of other hazards, such as chemical releases, landslides and wildfires.

This presentation will give an overview of the work and operations of EMARC, in particular, we will cover:

• How EMARC built on its 1980s atmospheric dispersion origins to evolve into a single 24/7 focal point for hazards, converging the interdisciplinary expertise of partners to provide operational services which assist authorities in preparing for and responding to emergencies caused by natural hazards.
• How these services provided by EMARC cover a full range of impact scales, from localised events which may cause minor disruption or discomfort, up to international catastrophic events which can cost billions in economic losses, and severely impact wider society, including potential loss of life.
• Examples of UK-specific services, including dispersion forecasts for chemical, radiological and biological releases, air quality forecasts, wildfire prediction, pollen forecasts, and temperature health alerts.
• The provision of weather forecasts direct to emergency responders, through EMARC working with a network of Met Office ‘Civil Contingency Advisors’ around the UK with expert regional knowledge.
• Examples of International services, include volcanic ash dispersion forecasting, and international-scale nuclear release dispersion forecasting, and utilising a co-located Space Weather centre at the Met Office with cross-trained meteorologists to provide resilience to EMARC during high-impact events.
• How EMARC meteorologists also assist with operations-to-research (R2O) within the Met Office by assessing the performance of the in-house ‘NAME’ atmospheric dispersion model and other capabilities, and providing feedback to Met Office modellers and scientists.

These points will help to illustrate the unique position of EMARC within the Met Office, the wider natural hazards and resilience community and UK government.