Awards for Impact on Science, Policy or Society

 David Walters

Following a PhD in Theoretical Physics from the University of Wales, David has spent close to 20 years involved in the development of weather and climate models. For the last decade he has been leading this work in the Met Office delivering improved unified modelling systems underpinning weather forecasts and climate projections. David has been especially key in developing processes that ensure the UK delivers the most effective National Capabilities in weather and climate prediction and projections through a unified process to evaluate weather and climate performance. In addition to developing and refining the process he has led the implementation of the development of four versions of the Unified Model; each is documented in the peer review literature (Walters et al., 2011, 2014, 2017, 2019).

David is a worthy winner of the FitzRoy award as the delivery of improved weather and climate modelling systems he has led on are critical to the services delivered by the Met Office. Without this development we would not have seen the improvements in our contributions the CMIP process in IPCC or the improvements we have seen in our Numerical Weather Prediction scores. These capabilities in weather and climate systems underpin weather forecasts and climate services used by the public, industry and government.

In the last four years David has led Met Office Research to Operations activities. Working with our operational meteorologists he has ensured that the model development we do responds to the users of our weather models and that users are ready for the developments that are made to our systems. His team coordinates our Testbed activity where we evaluate future developments in an operational environment. This work remains fundamental in ensuring new versions of our NWP systems continue to improve the critical services the Met Office delivers to save lives and livelihoods.

Walters, D. N. et. al 2019: The Met Office Unified Model Global Atmosphere 7.0/7.1 and JULES Global Land 7.0 configurations. Geosci. Model Dev., 12, 1909–1963, 2019 https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-12-1909-2019

Walters, D., et al 2017.: The Met Office Unified Model Global Atmosphere 6.0/6.1 and JULES Global Land 6.0/6.1 configurations, Geosci. Model Dev., 10, 1487–1520, https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-10-1487-2017 

Walters, D. N., et al. 2014.: The Met Office Unified Model Global Atmosphere 4.0 and JULES Global Land 4.0 configurations, Geosci. Model Dev., 7, 361–386, https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-7-361-2014 

Walters, D. N., et.al., 2011.: The Met Office Unified Model Global Atmosphere 3.0/3.1 and JULES Global Land 3.0/3.1 configurations, Geosci. Model Dev., 4, 919–941, https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-4-919-2011 

Kirklees Council Energy & Climate Change Team

Kirklees Council are honoured to receive the 2022, Royal Meteorological Society ‘Award for Impact’; presented in recognition of people, projects, or programmes within the academic, scientific, or business communities who have made significant contributions to educating, informing, or motivating organisations in response to meteorological challenges.

In accepting this award, we also wish to acknowledge Consultancy firm WSP who are our affiliates in this award, and we thank them for their contributions.

Kirklees Council declared a climate emergency in January 2019, establishing a district-wide target to be Net Zero by 2038. Since declaring a Climate Emergency, we have taken important steps on our journey to delivering climate action to reduce our emissions including recognising the need to develop our climate target to emphasise climate adaptation. In response, Kirklees now strives toward being “Climate Ready” and Net Zero by 2038.

Being “Climate Ready” was also the focus for our Climate Change Risk and Vulnerability Assessment (CCRVA), which identifies, reports on, and promotes actions related to the risks and opportunities of a changing climate for Kirklees as district. The CCRVA was developed by Kirklees Council’s Energy & Climate Change Team in collaboration with WSP, incorporating met office UKCP18 data, principles of adaptative capacity and outcomes from extensive stakeholder engagement and contributed to the evidence base for the Kirklees Council Climate Change Action Plan.

For Kirklees Council, this not only demonstrates climate leadership, but also proactively contributes to the increased awareness, education and upskilling of Council staff and Kirklees based businesses, residents, and communities. The findings influence decision-making and support long-term planning for climate risks, defining ‘our’ Council-wide approach to become more resilient in the face of climate change and significant weather events likely to be experienced in the future.

Our changing climate not only poses risks to Kirklees Council, its residents and the businesses that call it home, but it also presents opportunities. These include enhancing biodiversity and landscaping, improving health and wellbeing and providing business opportunities and cost savings.

The development of the CCRVA by Kirklees Council with help from WSP, highlights how a local authority, through collaboration, engagement, and data-driven research and analysis can produce a report which significantly contributes to educating, informing, and motivating us an organisation to address meteorological challenges such as extreme weather events linked to climate change.

We are proud to accept this award and acknowledge in doing so that a low-carbon and resilient future is not the preserve of ‘the few,’ but the right of everyone in Kirklees. Moving forward, whilst taking action to mitigate carbon emission or adapt to climate change impacts, we also need to focus just as strongly on broader environmental issues; helping to address the ecological and the climate emergency, whilst also generating benefits and improved outcomes for our residents and our places.

Rainfall Rescue Volunteers

In March 2020, as the UK entered the pandemic lockdown, the Rainfall Rescue project began. The aim was simple: to transcribe historical rainfall observations from 66,000 images, each containing up to a decade of monthly rainfall amounts for a single location. To achieve this aim was harder – it would take one person several years to transcribe these sheets – an army of volunteers was needed.

Fortunately, more than 16,000 volunteers stepped forward and transcribed a total of 5.28 million measurements in just 16 days using the RainfallRescue.org website. At least 4 independent volunteers transcribed every number and location name, meaning around 100 million keystrokes were typed, and several years of person-effort were donated by these volunteers.

But that was not the end of the project. To be useful, every observation had to be located in the correct position across the country and quality-control procedures performed. A group of 8 dedicated volunteers have spent the last 3 years searching through census information, poring over historical maps and digging into ancestry information to find the homes for 1000s of rain gauges, dealing with place name changes and vague or uncertain clues on each of the rainfall sheets. They have also had to decipher hand-writing, ensure that the observations had been transcribed correctly, and that months with uncertain data were flagged or removed. This is highly detailed work, all done remotely, but they have formed a virtual team with developed expertise in different aspects of the problem.

These 8 volunteers are ‘amateurs’ – they had no experience of rainfall measurement before this project – but they have made a fundamental contribution to our understanding of observed rainfall variations across the UK. The work of these volunteers has made a direct and demonstrable positive impact to UK climate research, with the outcome that our national rainfall series has been extended by 26 years and the granularity of the information greatly improved for the century spanning 1862-1960, which relied not only on the rainfall measurements themselves but also the detective work required to locate them geographically. As an observational record of UK climate the value of these data will only increase with time and it will be supporting climate scientists today and in the decades and centuries to come.

Mike Baldock, John Brazier, Gill Hersee, Jacqui Huntley, Richard Meats, John O’Grady, Ian Scrimgeour & Tim Silk are worthy winners of the Award for Innovation in Development or Use of Observations or Instrumentation. In addition, this award also gratefully acknowledges the 16,000 volunteers who transcribed the observations and, importantly, the thousands of observers who took the original observations, who were also often unpaid volunteers. It is thanks to George Symons and his team at the British Rainfall Organisation that the observations were originally taken, collated and made available on paper. The National Meteorological Archive has carefully curated the paper sheets for decades, and subsequently scanned them to ensure they remained accessible. Without any of these groups we would still be in the dark about past UK rainfall variations.

Professor Bryan Lawrence

Management and analysis of petabyte data volumes is only feasible through access to dedicated high-performance computing systems as platforms on which to run specialized software. Professor Bryan Lawrence, Professor of Weather and Climate Computing of the University of Reading and the National Centre for Atmospheric Science (NCAS), has made nationally and internationally important contributions to the design, development, implementation, and governance of computational and data services for environmental science in a range of leadership roles including as Director of the Centre for Environmental Data Analysis (CEDA) and as Director of Models and Data for NCAS. Of particular note is the key role he played in the instigation and subsequent evolution of the JASMIN data analysis facility.

Bryan clearly recognised at an early stage the nature of the data deluge and the need for a data infrastructure that co-located compute and storage comprising a significant amount of fast disk, a large batch compute facility, a comprehensive data analysis software stack, virtualisation capability, and a tape storage component. JASMIN came into being in 2012 as a NERC/STFC infrastructure to support analysis of CEDA archived datasets and datasets generated elsewhere and imported to collaborative workspaces on fast disk. An early successful adopter of JASMIN was the data-intensive UPSCALE high-resolution modelling project (https://hrcm.ceda.ac.uk/research/projects/upscale/). The shared facility enabled access to the data, to data analysis software, and to the compute resource required to analyse the data under a single integrated infrastructure.

JASMIN has subsequently become the de facto facility underpinning data management and analysis for the UK weather and climate observational and modelling communities, also supporting many international collaborations. Its use in areas as diverse as CMIP6 (https://help.ceda.ac.uk/article/4801-cmip6-data) and Joint Nature Conservation Committee (https://jncc.gov.uk/our-work/simple-ard-service/) are testament to Bryan’s vision.

Just as Bryan’s insight led to JASMIN development, so he continued the drive to adopt the latest technologies to complement the JASMIN compute suite, for example the recent introduction of the ORCHID GPU cluster. In addition, Bryan’s role in developing and exploiting data standards is unlocking the potential for alternative storage media and indeed alternative storage paradigms that will be key to efficiently managing petascale and exascale data workflows. In this area and others he has provided key international leadership, notably through central roles in infrastructure development for the European Network for Earth System Modelling (ENES).

Use of CEDA and JASMIN has become second nature to us – given the volumes and velocity of data, it is difficult to imagine how we could make progress without them. Not only do they provide a place to store and analyse data, they also serve as a means to conveniently share information and are fertile ground on which to develop the next generation data toolset.