The Met Office Hadley Centre — named in honour of

George Hadley George Hadley (12 February 1685 – 28 June 1768) was an English lawyer and amateur meteorologist who proposed the atmospheric mechanism by which the trade winds are sustained, which is now named in his honour as Hadley circulation. As a key ...

— is one of the

United Kingdom The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotland, Wales and North ...

's leading centres for the study of scientific issues associated with

climate change In common usage, climate change describes global warming—the ongoing increase in global average temperature—and its effects on Earth's climate system. Climate change in a broader sense also includes previous long-term changes to E ...

. It is part of, and based at the headquarters of the

Met Office The Meteorological Office, abbreviated as the Met Office, is the United Kingdom's national weather service. It is an executive agency and trading fund of the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy and is led by CEO Penelope E ...

Exeter Exeter () is a city in Devon, South West England. It is situated on the River Exe, approximately northeast of Plymouth and southwest of Bristol. In Roman Britain, Exeter was established as the base of Legio II Augusta under the personal comm ...

Foundation

The Hadley Centre was founded in 1990, having been approved by the then British Prime Minister Mrs

Margaret Thatcher Margaret Hilda Thatcher, Baroness Thatcher (; 13 October 19258 April 2013) was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990 and Leader of the Conservative Party (UK), Leader of the Conservative Party from 1975 to 1990. S ...

and was first named the ''Hadley Centre for Climate Research and Prediction'' but subsequently renamed on various occasions.

Major aims

The centre has several major aims: *To understand physical, chemical and biological processes within the climate system and develop state-of-the-art

climate model Numerical climate models use quantitative methods to simulate the interactions of the important drivers of climate, including atmosphere, oceans, land surface and ice. They are used for a variety of purposes from study of the dynamics of the cl ...

s *To use climate models to simulate global and regional climate variability and change *To predict inter-annual to decadal variability of climate *To predict long term climate change *To monitor global and national climate variability and change *To attribute recent changes in climate to specific factors The 30th anniversary of the Hadley Centre was celebrated in 2020. The Met Office employs over 1500 staff, with approximately 200 working in its climate research unit. Most of its funding comes from contracts with the

Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) is a department of His Majesty's Government responsible for environmental protection, food production and standards, agriculture, fisheries and rural communities in the United K ...

(DEFRA), other United Kingdom Government departments and the

European Commission The European Commission (EC) is the executive of the European Union (EU). It operates as a cabinet government, with 27 members of the Commission (informally known as "Commissioners") headed by a President. It includes an administrative body o ...

. It also works closely with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) providing worldwide climate forecasting and predictions. The climate model (

HadGEM HadGEM1 (abbreviation for ''Hadley Centre Global Environmental Model, version 1'') is a coupled climate model developed at the Met Office’s Hadley Centre in 2006 and used in IPCC Fourth Assessment Report on climate change. It represents a signifi ...

) developed by the centre is used for climate change research purposes across the world. It covers both Ocean modelling and Atmospheric Modelling. Collecting data from across the world.

Research projects based on Hadley Centre climate models

The UK Climate Prediction Project uses the Hadley Centre climate model projections of future UK climate to inform UK government policy. The Australian Bureau of Meteorology and the Korean Meteorological Agency use the Hadley Centre GloSea5 system for long range prediction. The

volunteer computing Volunteer computing is a type of distributed computing in which people donate their computers' unused resources to a research-oriented project, and sometimes in exchange for credit points. The fundamental idea behind it is that a modern desktop co ...

project

ClimatePrediction.net climate''prediction''.net (CPDN) is a volunteer computing project to investigate and reduce uncertainties in climate modelling. It aims to do this by running hundreds of thousands of different models (a large climate ensemble) using the donated ...

is a research team based at the

University of Oxford , mottoeng = The Lord is my light , established = , endowment = £6.1 billion (including colleges) (2019) , budget = £2.145 billion (2019–20) , chancellor ...

conducting research into global climate change using adapted versions of the

s developed at the Hadley Centre. Individuals can participate in the research efforts by donating spare computer resources to aid their research. The

PRECIS (Providing Regional Climates for Impacts Studies) PRECIS (Providing REgional Climates for Impacts Studies, pronounced pray-sea) is developed at the Hadley Centre at the UK Met Office, PRECIS is a regional climate modelling system designed to run on a Linux-based PC. PRECIS can be applied to any a ...

project enables scientists from the around the globe to run a regional climate model towards carrying out research into climate change.

References

External links

*
Hadley Centre data provision
{{Authority control Climate change organisations based in the United Kingdom Numerical climate and weather models Research in the United Kingdom 1990 establishments in the United Kingdom Met Office