Consortium > METO

Met Office Hadley Centre for Climate Change

Organization short name: METO
acronym:
web page: www.metoffice.gov.uk/climatechange/science/hadleycentre

Description of the organization

The Met Office Hadley Centre is a world-leading centre which provides a focus in the United Kingdom for the scientific issues associated with climate change. The main aims of the Hadley Centre are

  1. to understand physical, chemical and biological processes within the climate system and develop state-of-the-art climate models which represent them,
  2. to use climate models to simulate global and regional climate variability and change over the last 100 years and to predict changes over the next 100 years,
  3. to monitor global and national climate variability and change,
  4. to attribute recent changes in climate to specific factors, and
  5. to understand, with the aim of predicting, the natural interannual to decadal variability of climate.

It currently employs around 160 staff and uses NEC SX-6 and SX-8 supercomputers. Most of its funding comes from contracts with the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), other United Kingdom Government departments and the European Commission.

Expertise and experience of the organization

The Met Office has considerable experience in the field of climate and Earth System modelling as well as in decadal to centennial simulations. The Met Office Hadley Centre has made significant contributions to the successive assessment reports of the IPCC and WMO ozone assessment reports. It has pioneered the coupling of biogeochemistry modelling interactively with global climate model simulations, demonstrating significant feedbacks such as between the climate and the carbon cycle, aerosols and atmospheric chemistry. The Met Office Hadley Centre also has significant expertise in the fields of climate impacts, detection and attribution of observed changes to underlying causes, and to observation, modelling and statistical analysis of extreme climatic events.

Selected reference projects

  • FP5 project CAMELS, Carbon assimilation and modelling of the European land surface
  • FP6 project ENSEMBLES, Develop an ensemble prediction system for climate changes
  • FP6 project CarboEurope-IP, Assessment of the European terrestrial carbon balance.

Key scientific / technical personnel

Chris Jones (Manager Terrestrial Carbon Cycle) will lead the Met Office contribution. He has pioneered coupled climate-carbon cycle modelling in the Met Office and has extensive experience of both model development and analysis and contributed to the IPCC 4th assessment report. His research interests include the role of soils in the global carbon cycle, quantification of uncertainty in climate carbon cycle feedbacks and the contribution of the carbon cycle to climate mitigation policies.

Responsibilities in CARBO-Extreme

  • Model experiments and scenario analysis (WP6)

Selected recent relevant publications

Cox PM, Betts RA, Jones CD, et al., Acceleration of global warming due to carbon-cycle feedbacks in a coupled climate model, Nature, 408, 2000. link to publisher

Jones CD et al., Global climate change and soil carbon stocks; predictions from two contrasting models for the turnover of organic carbon in soil. Global Change Biology 11(1), 154 - 166, 2005. link to publisher

Friedlingstein P, ..., Jones CD, et al., 2006, Climate-carbon cycle feedback analysis, results from the C4MIP model intercomparison, Journal of Climate 19(14), 3337–3353, 2006. link to publisher

Jones CD et al., 2006, Impact of Climate-Carbon Cycle Feedbacks on Emission Scenarios to Achieve Stabilisation, chapter 34 in, "Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change", Eds: Schellnhuber HJ et al., Cambridge University Press