Met Office

• 1. Introduction

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  The Met Office was born not in a laboratory but on the water. On the 1st of August 1854, Vice Admiral Robert FitzRoy opened a small department within the Board of Trade with one purpose: to keep sailors alive. FitzRoy had sailed with Charles Darwin aboard the Beagle, and he understood better than most how weather could turn a voyage deadly. What he built in London would grow into one of the most technically sophisticated forecasting operations on earth. How did a modest maritime service become the agency now running a supercomputer capable of 60 petaflops? And what does it take to predict the weather not just tomorrow, but years and decades from now?

• 2. FitzRoy's First Warnings

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  In October 1859, the passenger vessel Royal Charter was caught in a violent storm off the coast of Anglesey, killing 459 people. That disaster gave FitzRoy the political weight to act. He set up a network of 15 coastal stations capable of issuing visual gale warnings to ships at sea. The new electric telegraph made rapid dissemination possible. By 1861, the Met Office was sending weather forecasts directly to newspapers. FitzRoy even requested the daily photographic traces from the photo-barograph at Kew Observatory, an instrument invented by Francis Ronalds, to support this early forecasting work. When FitzRoy died, publication of forecasts stopped in May 1866. It took more than a decade before they resumed in April 1879.

• 3. The Military Connection

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  After the First World War, the Met Office folded into the Air Ministry in 1919. A phrase entered common use: "the weather on the Air Ministry roof", a reference to observations taken from the top of Adastral House where the Air Ministry was based. Aviation needed weather data urgently, so the Met Office placed many of its collection points on RAF airfields. That decision left a visible trace that persists to this day: the large number of military airfields still mentioned in weather reports. In 1936, services to the Royal Navy were split off into their own forecasting unit. By April 1990, the Met Office had become an executive agency of the Ministry of Defence, now required to act commercially. Even after leaving the MOD, it maintained frontline offices at RAF and Army bases, and its Mobile Met Unit, made up of Met Office staff who double as RAF reservists, continues to advise forward military units on battle conditions.

• 4. Moving to Exeter

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  In September 2003, the Met Office left its longstanding home in Bracknell, Berkshire, for a purpose-built structure costing 80 million pounds at Exeter Business Park, near junction 29 of the M5 motorway. The new building was officially opened on the 21st of June 2004 by Robert May, Baron May of Oxford, arriving just a few weeks before the Met Office's 150th anniversary. Exeter became the operational hub for services far beyond the UK. The Flood Forecasting Centre, formed in 2009 as a joint venture with the Environment Agency, sits inside the Exeter headquarters. It provides flood risk guidance for England and Wales. A separate Scottish Flood Forecasting Service handles Scotland through a joint venture with the Scottish Environment Protection Agency.

• 5. Global Reach, Aviation Safety

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  The Met Office holds a rare distinction in aviation: it is one of only two World Area Forecast Centres on the planet. Known as WAFC London, it shares this role with WAFC Washington, based in Kansas City, Missouri. Every day, airlines use WAFC data to route long-haul flights safely and efficiently, drawing on information about wind speed and direction, air temperature, and cloud type. On top of this, the Met Office operates the London Volcanic Ash Advisory Centre, one of nine such centres worldwide. It covers the British Isles, the north-east Atlantic and Iceland. When Icelandic volcanoes erupt, the London VAAC uses satellite images alongside seismic, radar, and visual data to track ash clouds. Its NAME dispersion model produces forecasts of ash movement at six, twelve and eighteen hours from the time of the alert, at different flight levels. NAME itself has a striking origin: it was first developed as a nuclear accident response tool following the Chernobyl disaster in 1986.

• 6. The Unified Model and Its Numbers

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  Every operational forecast at the Met Office runs on the Unified Model, known as the UM, released in 1990. Its name reflects its core design principle: a single modelling suite scalable across different ranges of space and time. The UKV, its deterministic model for the United Kingdom, runs at 1.5 km resolution over the UK and 4 km in surrounding areas, projecting out to a maximum of 120 hours. The global deterministic model reaches 1.0 km resolution out to six days. For ensemble forecasting, the UK model called MOGREPS-UK runs 18 members at 2.2 km resolution out to five days. The global ensemble, MOGREPS-G, also carries 18 members and operates at 20 km out to seven days. The Met Office was the first forecaster recognised by the World Meteorological Organisation as a Global Producing Centre of long range forecasts, and it continues to supply seasonal predictions to the WMO for distribution to national meteorological services worldwide.

• 7. Supercomputers Across the Decades

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  In November 1997, the Met Office supercomputer ranked third most powerful in the world. That machine, a Cray T3E capable of 430 gigaflops, represented a generation of hardware that would have been unimaginable to the engineers who in 1959 operated a Ferranti Mercury running at just 3 kiloflops. Each decade brought orders-of-magnitude jumps: the IBM System/360 in 1972 reached 4 megaflops; the CDC Cyber 205 in 1982 hit 200 megaflops; by 2009 an IBM Power6 was delivering 140 teraflops. A 2015 Cray XC40 reached 16 petaflops. The 2025 system, hosted on Microsoft Azure, runs at 60 petaflops with a horizontal global resolution of 10 km and 70 vertical levels. Each generation of hardware has directly enabled finer spatial resolution in the forecasts, cutting from 320 km in the 1950s down to 1.5 km locally today.

• 8. Storms, the BBC, and What Comes Next

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  In September 2015, the Met Office and Irish counterpart Met Eireann introduced a joint storm naming system to give a single authoritative name to storms hitting the UK and Ireland. The first named storm under this arrangement, Abigail, was announced on the 10th of November 2015. In 2019, the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, KNMI, joined the partnership. That same year brought a notable change in the Met Office's broadcasting relationships: on the 23rd of August 2015, the BBC had announced it was replacing the Met Office with a competing provider called MeteoGroup, driven by its obligation to deliver best value for licence fee payers. The BBC retained some Met Office data, particularly for severe weather warnings and the Shipping Forecast. In July 2025, the BBC announced it would be returning to a partnership with the Met Office. The current CEO, Penelope Endersby, who became the first woman to lead the organisation when she took the role in December 2018, will oversee that reunion.