Two new projects have been announced by the Met Office following open funding calls for the UK Climate Resilience programme in May 2019.
The Climate services standards monitoring and valuing contract was awarded to JBA Consulting. The aim of this project is to establish a coherent set of standards for climate services, considering different types of climate service users and providers from public and private sectors, so decision makers can improve their capacity to manage climate-related risk.
The standards framework will apply to climate services for present day, seasonal and longer-term future timeframes. The work will build on the near-complete SPF project, Review of climate resilience standards, guidance and codes of practice (CR19-2). It will draw on expertise nationally and internationally, relevant ISO documents on adaptation and risk, and findings from other UKCR projects.
This project is also developing and testing a methodology for monitoring and valuing climate service delivery and uptake, to see if it is possible to stimulate a market for climate services in the UK. The monitoring and valuing activity will use three case studies to develop a set of good practice exemplars on the valuation of climate services. The project is due to run for two years, to October 2022, and will involve widespread consultation with users and providers of climate services.
The second contract, Enabling the use and producing improved understanding of EuroCORDEX data over the UK, was awarded to University College London. This project will extend the current suite of UKCP climate projections by incorporating information from a broader range of high-resolution climate simulations, predominantly obtained from the EuroCORDEX downscaling experiment, but also incorporating other currently available high-resolution information.
This will support a more comprehensive sampling of uncertainty in high-resolution UK climate projections than has hitherto been possible, which in turn offers the potential to develop better-informed strategies for adapting to and mitigating the effects of future weather and climate.
In addition, the project will provide insights into the physical plausibility of the various simulations; will assess the value to be gained from the use of high-resolution information; will identify the dominant sources of uncertainty in future projections of a variety of weather indices; and will attempt to assess the extent to which the existing UKCP ensemble provides a decision-relevant characterisation of this uncertainty. To achieve these challenging objectives, the project takes a multidisciplinary approach combining expertise in climate modelling, modern statistics and uncertainty quantification, and software engineering.