Unified Model

Introduction to UKESM

The UK Earth System Model (UKESM) has been built as a joint venture between the Met Office Hadley Centre and the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC). It consists of the HadGEM3 coupled physical climate model plus additional components that model key biogeochemical, chemistry, aerosol and vegetation processes.

More information about the contents and development of UKESM is available on the UKESM website.

Latest release: UKESM1.1 - Information on UKESM1.1 development.

Previous release: UKESM1 - Release and support of UKESM1 and UKESM1 Release update.

Background and prerequisites

UKESM makes use of several scientific components, including the Unified Model (UM) weather and climate modelling application. Further information on the UM is available on our website.

UKESM is distributed and run as a Rose suite; Rose is a framework for developing and running meteorological applications. Some details about Rose are available on the Rose/Cylc pages.

The UKESM suites incorporate switches to choose the machine on which it is run; full details of how to do this are in the release notes below. Available resources include ARCHER2, the UKRI platform, and Monsoon2, the Met Office / NERC collaborative platform. See the following pages for further information on ARCHER2 and more about Monsoon2(including how to get registered on these machines).

The UKESM1 suites are available from the Met Office Science Repository Service (MOSRS). Note that you must have a registered account to access this service. If you are a NERC user, please contact us to request an account, otherwise please contact Scientific_Partnerships AT metoffice.gov.uk for advice about gaining access.

UKESM release notes

The UKESM release notes describe the different types of experiment which can be run using the model, how to access the suites, options for running the model (including selecting the target machine) and further configuration of the suites. Note that these pages contain links to the MOSRS, which is only accessible to registered users (see above).