When Admiral Fitzroy proposed the concept of a Meteorological Department in 1854, he was driven by the belief that it was possible to save lives, in particular at sea. This belief was built on his long understanding of the dangers of severe weather in the maritime environment, and the latest technology of the day – instruments including barometers, which enabled current weather to be measured, and the telegraph system, which meant that the observations could be transmitted faster than the weather could move. He even coined the term "forecast" to describe what he believed was achievable.
170 years on and there are many parallels, in the Met Office’s purpose, “Helping you make better decisions to stay safe and thrive”; in our use of cutting-edge science and technology to achieve the most accurate predictions possible; and in the expertise of our staff and their passion for the value of what we do.
Today’s Met Office, though, has a range of capabilities and responsibilities which Fitzroy could never have imagined. We still start from observations – 200 billion of them every day – from satellites, surface stations, radiosondes and ocean buoys. From those, we generate 3,000 forecasts daily, from our advanced atmospheric model and a supercomputer which can perform 14,000 trillion calculations per second, or 1.8 million calculations per second for every person on the planet.
All of you probably use those forecasts in your daily lives, whether you are one of the 6.3 million people who get your forecasts directly from us through the Met Office App, or the 2.4 million who follow us on social media, or whether you like to learn about the day’s weather from another source, because our public forecast data is available to others to make use of too. On an extreme weather day, our public website and mobile apps see 20.6 million page views and 2.1 terabytes of data downloaded.
But what the Met Office does goes far beyond those forecasts used directly by the citizen.
We help keep the skies safe. We are one of two world area forecast centres that route all the air traffic around the globe. So, if a flight is ten minutes early out of New York because it has been routed out of the jet stream and around the turbulence, that information will have come from the Met Office. And closer to home, we have meteorologists based at Heathrow, working with National Air Traffic Services to help make critical decisions about fog, ice or thunderstorms.
Our forecasting has supported British and allied defence operations worldwide for more than 100 years. Captain James Stagg’s D-Day forecast was one of the most important in history and today, our Mobile Met Unit of RAF reservists continue to support the armed forces wherever they are in the world. We have operational meteorologists working permanently at 21 UK military stations and five overseas, using their superior meteorological, oceanographic and climate science understanding to help make informed decisions in operations and in peacetime.
For 15 years, we’ve also worked in partnership with The Environment Agency, providing flood forecasting services for government and Category 1 and 2 responders through the Flood Forecasting Centre.
We also keep our air safe, providing advice on the dispersion of contaminants since the First World War. We’re one of nine Volcanic Ash Advisory Centres, with responsibility for the volcanoes in Iceland and the north-eastern corner of the North Atlantic which are most likely to affect our air space. Our teams also monitor things like nuclear accidents, chemical spills and airborne animal diseases, as well as providing routine air-quality and pollen forecasts.
We are advancing global understanding of our changing climate through groundbreaking research, which underpins critical services vital for UK resilience. Through the work of the Hadley Centre Climate Programme and our UK Climate Projections analysis tool, we provide authoritative scientific advice to government and customers on climate. The Met Office has contributed to all six IPCC assessment reports and through our consultancy services, our experts help integrate our information to decision makers across the globe, helping them find resilient routes to net zero and giving them valuable adaption advice. In the energy sector, for example, we advise on the impact of both weather and climate on aspects such as usage and infrastructure, helping inform decisions in all aspects of the sector, including generation, storage and distribution.
Sometimes, our work really is out of this world. Our Space Weather Operations Centre monitors solar activity 24/7. Although most people associate this with pretty aurora pictures, there’s actually a very serious side. The Met Office owns four of the UK government’s national risks, one of which is space weather, which can impact satellites, aviation, power and communication systems. Our team therefore monitors solar activity, providing warnings to the various industries which may be affected.
We don’t just work in the UK either. The Met Office has a true global impact. We are part of a huge international collaborative endeavour through the World Meteorological Organisation to share observations and forecast data worldwide. Through our international collaborative programmes, we're advancing global understanding of our changing climate through vital research, such as AmazonFACE, researching how the rainforest will respond to increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
And this work is all built on a centre of science and technology excellence. Behind everything we do is a team of excellent people, working to deliver extraordinary impact. We employ more than 500 scientists, who have had over 6,000 peer-reviewed papers published. Meteorological training is carried out in-house at the Met Office College, and we currently employ almost 400 operational meteorologists.
We are a vast data enterprise, with some of the biggest data in the world. We hold half an exabyte of data as part of our climate record. That’s five with 17 noughts after it!
So what about the next 170 years?
Our new supercomputer is now being tested and will be six times more powerful than the current machine. Provided by Microsoft, it will provide earlier, more accurate warnings of severe weather, and it will have the capability to take forward groundbreaking new climate change modelling. All this, whilst running on 100% renewable energy.
AI is also opening up new ways to forecast better. Our experimental AI weather model FastNet, in partnership with the Alan Turing Institute, is now giving results comparable to our global model. This is just the tip of the iceberg of how we see ourselves using this transformative technology in the future, in our production, our products and our services. Plus, that vast and expanding dataset has huge potential to generate benefit across the business as a training set for AI in many related areas such as transport, health and agriculture.
It is the most enormous privilege to follow in Fitzroy’s footsteps leading this fantastic organisation, with its cohort of 2,000 brilliant civil servants with their diverse skills. I am proud every day of the difference we make to the lives of people in the UK and across the globe and the contribution we make to ensuring that the challenges from a changing climate are understood, and the world is as prepared as possible to limit warming and adapt to the changes which are already inevitable. I’ve been a scientific civil servant all my working life, and it’s turning that scientific knowledge into something which makes a positive difference which has motivated me every day.
Professor Penny Endersby CBE, FREng, Hon FInstP is chief executive of the Met Office