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Collaboration with scientists at operational and academic centres around the World is central to the Met Office's strategy for developing the capability of the Met Office Unified Model. Scientific collaborations are possible through research and operational licence agreements. A comprehensive set of resources is available for licensed users and managed by the UM collaboration team, whose role is to facilitate effective and beneficial collaboration.

Key aims

• To develop a joint programme of research and development with scientists in the university and meteorological communities, beneficial to both the collaborators and the Met Office.
• To establish, monitor and review joint research and development activities which deliver a measurable net benefit to the NWP and climate prediction capabilities of the Unified Model suite.
• To facilitate the transfer of technology so that collaborators have up-to-date modelling systems with robust support systems in place.

Using the Unified Model

Source code for the Unified Model can be obtained through different types of licensing agreement with the Met Office.

• For non-commercial research, a licence can be obtained by submitting an abstract describing the proposed research.
• For official duty use, such as the provision of weather and climate services to the public, an operational licence may be granted, depending on the role of the user, their ability to run the software effectively and add value to output available from the Met Office, and their intended use.

For more information on using the Unified Model code, licence agreements and possibilities to become a UM partner through collaborative research and development, please contact the UM collaboration manager via the customer centre. If you wish to undertake research using output from the Met Office's operational runs of the Unified Model, please contact the British Atmospheric Data Centre (BADC).

Current projects

To ensure that the Unified Model suite remains world-class, Unified Model partners contribute to a number of collaborative research and development projects:

• Development of UM physical parameterization schemes, tropical cyclone initialisation procedures, observation processing software and ocean, sea-ice and land surface coupling with the Centre for Australian Weather and Climate Research.
• Use of new satellite data, diagnostic studies and evaluation of model configurations for predicting the East Asian monsoon and tropical cyclones at short timescales, modelling of atmospheric processes at climate timescales and development of a joint seasonal forecasting system with the Korea Meteorological Administration.
• Diagnostic studies and evaluation of model configurations for predicting the Asian monsoon, tropical cyclones and modelling atmospheric processes in the tropics and enhancing the use of Indian observations with the National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasts (India).
• Development of the Joint UK Land Environment Simulator snow scheme with the Norwegian Meteorological Institute.
• Improvements to satellite data assimilation techniques, use of new satellite data and improved site specific forecasting with statistical post processing with the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (New Zealand).
• Testing of convective precipitation parameterization schemes and diagnostic studies and model evaluation of the diurnal cycle of rainfall, total rainfall accumulation, and the spatial distribution of rain in southern Africa with the South African Weather Service.
• Development of the United Kingdom Chemistry Aerosol (UKCA) model, high resolution global coupled modelling, monsoon simulation and ice sheet modelling with the UK Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) community using the jointly owned MONSooN high performance computer through the Joint Weather and Climate Research Programme (JWCRP).
• Development of a new dynamical core for the Unified Model through the Next Generation Weather and Climate Prediction programme in partnership with the  Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) and the Science and Technology Facility Council's (STFC) Hartree Centre.

Collaboration resources

• Online support for collaborations is provided via the Collaboration Wiki (username and password required for access). This is available to all licensed users, providing news, support, operational and project information.
• The FCM system is open-source software for managing and building source code. It is developed and used at the Met Office using open-source tools.