10 weather research projects funded under S$25m programme to improve forecasting
The Climate and Weather Research Alliance Singapore (CAWRAS) was established today as a national research platform to advance tropical climate and weather research for Singapore and Southeast Asia and to nurture local talent pipeline in weather and climate science. CAWRAS is jointly established by the National Environment Agency (NEA), Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore), and the National University of Singapore (NUS). 2 As a start, CAWRAS will implement the $25 million Weather Science Research Programme (WSRP) funded under the Research, Innovation and Enterprise 2025 Plan announced earlier this year. Led by the Centre for Climate Research Singapore (CCRS)1, CAWRAS brings together leading research institutions to expand weather science capabilities at the national level. This coordinated effort comes at a time when advances in technology, such as high-resolution modelling, artificial intelligence (AI), and enhanced observational networks, present new opportunities to improve weather prediction. The research alliance will expand its scope to include climate research on longer timescales in future.
Ten research projects have been awarded under the WSRP, focusing on four key areas: improving the use of weather observations, developing next-generation weather/climate models, performing a detailed historical weather re-analysis over recent decades for Southeast Asia, and enhancing weather prediction accuracy through advanced post-processing techniques.
One of the projects would be led by Assistant Professor Wang Jingyu from the NIE NTU, Singapore. Entitled 'Understanding the Effects of Multi-Scale Atmospheric Processes in Predicting Tropical Weather Systems', the project aims to advance the prediction of tropical weather, a task made difficult by the complex interactions of weather systems across different scales. The research focuses on developing advanced modeling techniques that can simultaneously capture both large-scale tropical systems and localized weather phenomena, while also enhancing high-resolution forecasting to run efficiently on next-generation supercomputers. A key aspect of the project involves improving how weather models represent the interactions between atmospheric and land processes, allowing for more accurate simulations of extreme events. By deepening our understanding of tropical weather dynamics, this work will strengthen forecasting capabilities for phenomena such as thunderstorms and heatwaves, which are increasingly critical to urban safety, infrastructure resilience, and public health across Singapore and Southeast Asia.
Read the press release here.
