Operational Meteorologist-Led O2R Activities at the Met Office (or What I Do When I’m Not Forecasting Weather)

The last ten to fifteen years have seen a marked growth in the range of forecasting operations-focused Operations-to-Research (O2R) activities at the Met Office. The range and maturity of many of these activities has developed such that in more recent years dedicated resource has been drawn from the chief operational meteorologist community to lead, manage and develop these activities. The goal is to ensure an operational, forecasting-focused perspective is represented in the O2R/R2O (Research to Operations) space.

Here, an overview of the range of activities O2R is active in is presented. Activities can be categorized as follows: process groups providing governance and steering, model evaluation and testbed co-organisation.

A number of process groups exist within the Met Office to draw on senior representation from key areas across the organisation to communicate and seek feedback on plans for requirements, research, development and delivery of new capabilities and upgrades. Interests here extend across a wide range of activities including the interests of NWP and post-processed outputs and some of the associated IT frameworks. O2R are invited to ensure that the plans align with forecasters present and future requirements.

Model evaluation activities effectively fall into two categories, one providing subjective analysis of proposed future model packages and formulations and the other a retrospective assessment of model output. The former process supplements objective evaluation and verification of these packages and formulations, providing an operational perspective as to what they mean to and how they could be used by the forecasting community and how they could be impacted by their introduction. The latter category reviews a log of model performance called the Daily Forecast Assessment, completed by operational teams and then retrospectively assessed if model performance is considered particularly poor. These assessments are reviewed by O2R or O2R subgroups and Met Office Science and informs both the Met Office’s formal model characteristics documentation and model development processes.

Since 2013 the Met Office has run a series of testbeds aimed at allowing operations and researchers to come together to evaluate new tools and share experience, the results then helping drive future developments of forecasting tools. In recent years, O2R has taken a leading role in organising testbeds and delivering their results.

Other O2R activities include helping develop and test new forecasting tools, representation of the operational perspective to internal groups taking a more detailed look at specific elements of model performance, evaluation of impactful weather events to consider model performance, public service warning strategy and verification and forecasting best practice.