Improvements in Collaboration between Operational Forecasting and Research in an Environment of High-Powered Supercomputing within the Met Office

As the Met Office continues to develop capability offered by our new supercomputer, continued and ongoing collaboration between research and operations has become essential to ensure the potential benefits, developments and model improvements possible are realised. This will also ensure that the Met Office’s vision of generating £2billion in socio-economic benefits to the UK is also achieved.
Through dialogue and shared working, modellers, scientists and operational forecasters have all collaborated to allow ongoing assessment of new and evolving model suites so as to achieve benefits for users and customers alike.
This has been achieved by:
Ongoing operational assessment of models in real time by the Chief and Deputy Chief forecasters.
Dialogue and shared working practises between modellers, scientists and operational forecasters with the end result being improved/more relevant models.
Proper channels to feedback on model performance.
A feedback loop which allows continuous conversations and development of models.
An in depth understanding of how high impact weather threatens the UK’s socio and economic interests and how we can help mitigate against these high impact events.

Forecasters are now benefitting from a collaborative, well
informed and strategic process when it comes to developing new
models and model outputs to directly benefit operational
output. This collaboration is now considered so important that it
is overseen by a dedicated team and headed by someone whose
role is to ensure science delivers the best possible NWP suite to
operational forecasters so as to give the Met Office the prediction
tools that it needs to achieve its goals.