What was your highlight of 2024?
For me personally, the highlight was my involvement in the Peers for the Planet Parliamentarians' Guide to Climate Change. This primer on all aspects of climate change has been given to every UK parliamentarian, and is already being translated into other languages and picked up by other legislatures. I was asked to write the opening "chapter" – all of climate science in 600 words, and spoke at the launch in the House of Commons. It was one of those rare occasions where I felt I might personally have contributed to good decisions which will make our planet a safer place in future.
For the Met Office, I would like to single out the work of our Space Weather Operations Team in the largest solar storm since 2003. Many of you saw pretty auroras because it was well forecast: indeed I was thrilled to be out on Dartmoor myself, crossing an item off my lifetime's bucket list. Meanwhile the team were also working to the maximum to ensure that operators of satellites, aviation, power grids and more were prepared and impacts were minimised. Space weather is a lesser-known part of the Met Office's remit, but we own the national risk and develop cutting edge techniques to improve our forecasts as well as maintaining a 24/7 operational capability.
What was the hardest part of being a leader in 2024?
Probably the uncertainty around the election: both in terms of policy and personalities and in terms of spending plans. It requires making sensible decisions about what must wait and reassuring staff around uncertainties. The post-election rush of stakeholder engagement and spending review preparation came a little later than I expected.
What are the main challenges facing your organisation in the coming year – and how are you planning to meet them?
Finally switching over to our new supercomputer and ensuring we realise the promised benefits in terms of improved forecasting. We have a big portfolio of technology transformation to grapple with, we are changing the computer – which we do every few years – and also our main weather model; this is a once-in-a-generation change for the purposes of being able to take advantage of new supercomputer technologies, particularly in the cloud. On top of that the rise of AI has presented us with what may be the first real disruption to the way that weather forecasting has been done in 50 years. We are extremely proud to have developed FastNet, the Met Office's new AI global weather model, in partnership with the Turing Institute. It's early days though and we need to be certain that the model is as trustworthy as our existing methods before we can rely on it for operational use. We have hard decisions to make about where to place our human and computer resources over the next few years to deliver the best data which will help the UK make better decisions to stay safe and thrive.
What was the best Christmas present you’ve ever given or received? And the worst?
My husband would say that his best Christmas present was the small apple press I gave him to take advantage of our yearly crop of 100kg or so of apples. Followed the next year by the dewars to make cider, as even reduced to juice we don't have freezer space for the whole crop. We are onto year three of cider brewing and slowly refining our technique.
As for the worst, that was hands down the stick insect eggs and vivarium my brother-in-law gave my children. They bred like crazy, needed feeding and cleaning, and it's ecologically unsound to release them. Twenty years on, and even after giving his three kids football rattles the next year, I don't feel sufficiently avenged.