Transition of Met Office Science Showcased at the 2012 Olympics into Operations

In 2010 the Met Office won the contract to provide forecast services to The London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games (LOCOG) who were responsible for preparing and staging the London 2012 Games. As part of this contract, the Met Office provided past climatological data, observation equipment at certain venues, forecasters at LOCOG's main control centre at Canary Wharf, London and at Eton Dorney and Weymouth during test events as well as during the Games themselves, live feeds of weather information to LOCOG's intranet and services for torch relay and opening ceremony.

Coinciding with the installation of a new supercomputer in 2011, a number of new, cutting edge scientific developments were showcased at the Olympics and Paralympics with a view to further development and ultimate pull-through into the operational forecasting environment. Among the NWP featured in the ‘Science Showcase' was a convection allowing high resolution ensemble run on a domain covering the British Isles (MOGREPS-UK), very high resolution atmosphere and wave models run to support sailing events and a new high-resolution rapid update cycle nowcast model (NDP). Meanwhile the Science Showcase provided a vehicle to expedite the operational introduction of AQUM, the Met Office's air quality model, to external client groups. Developed in 2010, AQUM represented a leap forward in Met Office environmental model, it being an online model coupling atmospheric chemistry and dynamics.

MOGREPS-UK is the world's second continuous, operational convection allowing ensemble. Taking its lateral boundary conditions from MOGREPS-G, this 12 member ensemble runs four times a day out to T+36 with 70 vertical levels and 2.2 km horizontal resolution. Since the 2012 Games MOGREPS-UK has been successfully pulled through into forecasting operations, for example, forming one of the cornerstones of the BestData concept which blends and optimizes Met Office NWP output to generate site-specific for more than 10,000 sites.

The Nowcasting Demonstration Project forms part of a long-term strategy to develop a fully NWP-based nowcasting system to replace the current extrapolation/model blend. Taking lateral boundary conditions from the fully convection allowing 1.5 km horizontal resolution UKv and incorporating 4dVAR data assimilation, NDP is a rapid update cycle model updating hourly and running out to T+12. Future plans include it being trialled UK-wide with a view to operational introduction during 2016 or 2017.

In order to support sailing events at Weymouth Bay, a 333m horizontal resolution model nested in the 1.5km UKv was run along with a 1 km horizontal resolution version of SWAN wave model thus allowing complex topography and bathymetry of the region to better captured and for smaller scale wind details, sea breezes for example, to more successfully modelled. Verification of the 333m model demonstrated the ability of very high resolution modelling to successfully provide detail otherwise not adequately resolved by lower resolution convection-allowing models and a new version of this model is now being run over the London region to aid, amongst other things, the aviation forecasting effort at major airports in the area.