Forecasting Capabilities for the London 2012 Olympics

The provision of weather forecasts for the London Olympic and Paralympic Games in 2012 offered the opportunity for the Met Office to accelerate the transition to operations of several advanced numerical modeling capabilities and to demonstrate their performance to external scientists. It was also an event that captured public interest, providing an opportunity to educate and build trust in the weather forecasting enterprise in the United Kingdom and beyond. The baseline NWP guidance for the duration of the Olympic Games came from three main configurations of the Met Office Unified Model: global 25-km deterministic, North Atlantic/Europe 18-km ensemble, and U.K. 1.5-km deterministic. The advanced capabilities demonstrated during the Olympic Games consisted of a rapid-update hourly cycle of a 1.5-km grid length configuration for the southern United Kingdom using four-dimensional variational data assimilation (4D-Var) and enhanced observations; a 2.2-km grid length U.K. ensemble; a 333-m grid length configuration of the Unified Model and 250-m configuration of the Simulating Waves Nearshore (SWAN) ocean wave model for Weymouth Bay; and a 12-km grid length configuration of Air Quality in the Unified Model with prognostic aerosols and chemistry. Despite their different levels of maturity, each of the new capabilities provided useful additional guidance to Met Office weather advisors, contributing to an outstanding service to the Olympic Games organizers and the public. The website provided layered access to information about the science and to selected real-time products, substantially raising the profile of Met Office weather forecasting research among the United Kingdom and overseas public.