Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Met Office was established on the 1st of August 1854 as a small department within the Board of Trade, created by Vice Admiral Robert FitzRoy to provide weather services for mariners. FitzRoy built a network of 15 coastal stations and began supplying weather forecasts to newspapers by 1861.
The Met Office headquarters is at Exeter Business Park in Devon, near junction 29 of the M5 motorway. The purpose-built building cost 80 million pounds and was officially opened on the 21st of June 2004 by Robert May, Baron May of Oxford.
Penelope Endersby is the CEO of the Met Office, having taken on the role in December 2018. She is the first woman to serve as Chief Executive of the organisation.
The Unified Model, or UM, is the principal forecasting suite used by the Met Office, released in 1990. It underpins all operational Numerical Weather Prediction, running deterministic and ensemble forecasts at resolutions as fine as 1.5 km over the UK and 1.0 km globally.
WAFC London, or the Met Office's World Area Forecast Centre, is one of only two such centres in the world. It provides daily aviation data including wind speed, air temperature, and cloud information used to safely route aircraft on long-haul journeys. The other WAFC is based in Kansas City, Missouri.
NAME was originally developed as a nuclear accident response model following the Chernobyl disaster in 1986. It has since become an all-purpose dispersion model used for air quality forecasting, volcanic ash tracking, and emergency response.