EPCC partners with UK's National Centre for Atmospheric Science

Professor Stephen Mobbs, Executive Director at the National Centre for Atmospheric Science (NCAS), sets out the scope of the new partnership agreement:

“NCAS collaborates with a growing number of universities and research institutes across the UK to address some of the most crucial questions in climate change, air pollution, and weather science – and this now includes EPCC. Our new EPCC partnership, announced today, will bring additional world-leading computational science to NCAS. We are excited by this opportunity to link our research with the UK’s leading centre for supercomputing and data science expertise; this further extends our formal links with science excellence in Scotland, which began in 2024 with our partnership with the University of St Andrews.”

EPCC's Edinburgh-based research team will align their work closely with the Natural Environment Research Council’s Digital Strategy, and with the new “Digital Atmosphere” science programme at NCAS.

Ioana Colfescu, the Digital Atmosphere Programme and NCAS Scotland lead, and a Machine Learning (ML) and Climate Principal Fellow at the University of St Andrews, says: “Climate science is drowning in data but we are still in huge need of insight. Traditional simulations in our field demand colossal energy but new computational hardware and software, including ML, can distil complexity into efficiency, replacing brute-force computation with learned intuition. The science this partnership will enable isn’t just optimisation - it’s a reimagining of computational science in harmony with the planet, in order to tackle fundamental climate change related issues.”

Professor Mark Parsons, EPCC Director and Dean of Research Computing at the University of Edinburgh, welcomed the agreement, saying:

“EPCC has worked with NCAS and its partners through the national HPC services for many years. We’re very pleased to have now been invited to formally join NCAS as one of those partners and to have been given the opportunity to grow our collaboration with the Centre from this strong base. Over the past decade, EPCC has broadened its supercomputing activities by adding a significant data science and AI focus. We look forward to bringing these skills to NCAS’s many scientific programmes.”

National Centre for Atmospheric Science

The National Centre for Atmospheric Science is a world-leading research centre, funded by the Natural Environment Research Council. Its research falls into three key areas: air pollution, climate and high-impact weather and long-term global changes in our atmosphere. It also provides the UK with state-of-the-art services for observing and modelling the atmosphere, and plays a significant role in many international science programmes. https://ncas.ac.uk/

Image shows a representation of the humidity field of a large simulation made using EPIC, the elliptical parcel-in-cell software. EPIC is a revolutionary parcel-based cloud model developed by the University of St Andrews, the University of Leeds and EPCC.