The Met Office, a trading fund within the Department for Business Innovation and Skills, plan to share as much information in the form of open data as possible as part of a drive to boost the creation of new services that use weather data.
Under the Public Records Act, the Met Office is responsible for recording the UK’s weather and is currently in the process of updating paper records from as far back as 1854, when the office was founded.
By partnering with the ODI, the Met Office hopes to update these records so that as many as possible are electronically available as open data.
Through the partnership programme, which is an international, collaborative network of businesses, startups and organisations that allows members to access, use, and publish open data, the Met Office will also improve and expand its range of open data to go beyond the current DataPoint API service that publishes 5-day forecasts, real time observations and regularly updated forecasts for mountain weather, national parks and UK regions.
Charles Ewen, chief information officer at the Met Office said: "The Met Office takes open data very seriously and we’re excited to be working with the ODI to make open data more useful and [more] widely used.”
Gavin Starks, CEO of the Institute, said: “The Met Office is a world-class British institution actively seeking to innovate in tackling national and global challenges.”