Singapore's Weather Science Research Programme

Singapore's Weather Science Research Programme (WSRP) is a S$25 million national research programme launched in March 2025 to improve understanding and prediction of tropical urban weather, including extreme events associated with climate change (National Environment Agency, 4 March 2025). It is funded under the Research, Innovation and Enterprise 2025 Plan and is intended to build national weather-science capability through collaboration between the Meteorological Service Singapore, local Institutes of Higher Learning, and research institutes. The programme is about research and forecasting capability, not a household weather-insurance scheme or a guarantee that every forecast will be accurate.

What WSRP studies

The programme has four broad research areas. Observations improves the use of satellite, radar, and other data through advanced data-assimilation methods. Next-generation models develops high-resolution weather and climate models tailored to tropical regions. Regional reanalysis reconstructs roughly 50 years of high-resolution historical weather across Southeast Asia, creating a dataset for studying past extremes and training AI/ML systems. Post-processing develops methods to extract more useful, uncertainty-aware information from model forecasts (National Environment Agency, accessed 19 August 2026). AI and machine learning are cross-cutting methods across these areas rather than a separate fifth programme.

CAWRAS and the awarded projects

The Climate and Weather Research Alliance Singapore (CAWRAS) was established in September 2025 by NEA, ASTAR, NTU Singapore, and NUS as a national research platform to implement WSRP and nurture a local talent pipeline (National Environment Agency, 5 September 2025). NEA's programme page lists ten awarded projects hosted across NUS, NTU, and ASTAR. They include radar-data assimilation, tropical weather prediction, urban-weather processes, atmospheric interactions across the Maritime Continent, AI foundation models for regional weather prediction, convective-hazard prediction, and blending forecasts from multiple models (National Environment Agency, accessed 19 August 2026). The list describes awarded research projects, not ten operational forecasting products already deployed to the public.

Relationship to other climate programmes

WSRP addresses short- to medium-term weather prediction and extreme-weather understanding. It is distinct from the National Sea Level Programme, which was completed in 2025 and focused on sea-level rise and variability, and from coastal-protection programmes that design and build physical defences. WSRP research can support resilience planning by improving information about heavy rain, strong winds, thunderstorms, and other tropical hazards, but a research result does not itself change a flood rule, create a seawall, or guarantee a particular warning for a specific location. Forecasts and public advisories remain operational products of the relevant meteorological authorities and should be checked for the date and location concerned.