Science for Impacts, Resilience and Adaptation (SIRA)
Developing and applying the Met Office's world-leading science to address customer requirements, across sectors, for weather and climate information.
In collaboration with other colleagues working in impacts, resilience and adaptation, we support our customers in understanding the potential impacts of weather and climate change on their operations, infrastructure, and management/business plans. This helps our customers to become more resilient to weather risks and to adapt to future climate change. Most frequently, this is done by undertaking bespoke scientific research and consultancy projects - either directly for our customers, or as members of consortia, together with other leading institutions who provide complementary expertise. Our customers and collaborators span a range of industrial, academic and governmental organisations.
Key aims
- To provide our customers and stakeholders with usable and relevant scientific outputs that support their weather/climate decision-making and planning on seasonal to centennial timescales
- To use existing Met Office scientific capability, and drive forward new capabilities in applied science, in order to address the emerging requirements of our customers and stakeholders.
Current projects
- We are involved in the Copernicus Climate Change Service proof-of-concept project Clim4Energy which brings together the climate science and user community in the energy sector to develop useful climate information for planning and adaptation.
- We are co-leading a work package on user engagement and dissemination in PRIMAVERA, a project which aims to develop a new generation of advanced and well-evaluated high-resolution global climate models, capable of simulating and predicting regional climate with unprecedented fidelity, for the benefit of governments, business and society in general.
- We are a partner in the National Institute for Health Research Health Protection Research Unit in Environmental Change and Health. This project brings health professionals and climate scientists together with the aim of enabling health decision-makers to have the knowledge, foresight and tools to mitigate, adapt to and benefit from environmental change.
- As part of the "Review of Natural Hazards" project - an ETI-funded consortium project led by EDF R&D UK Centre - we have been involved in identifying and addressing a selection of research gaps in the characterisation of natural hazards for high-value UK energy infrastructure.
