Met Office
The Met Office is the United Kingdom's national weather service, headquartered in Exeter, Devon, and the source from which much of Britain's weather news flows. Its forecasts, severe weather warnings and climate science supply broadcasters, newspapers, government, aviation, shipping and the public nationwide, around the clock, every day of the year. Founded on 1 August 1854 as a small department of the Board of Trade under Vice Admiral Robert FitzRoy, it pioneered the very idea of the weather forecast — FitzRoy coined the word — and today it runs one of the world's most powerful supercomputing operations, ingesting hundreds of millions of observations daily. When British media report that a storm has been named, a warning upgraded to red, or a heatwave declared, the Met Office is almost always the institution behind the announcement.
FitzRoy and the birth of the forecast
The Met Office's founder was Robert FitzRoy, the Royal Navy officer famous as captain of HMS Beagle during Charles Darwin's voyage. In 1854, on the recommendation of the President of the Royal Society and Vice Admiral Francis Beaufort, FitzRoy was appointed Meteorological Statist to the Board of Trade, with a staff of three, to collect weather data at sea and improve wind charts so that sailing times could be reduced. His department loaned tested instruments to Royal Navy and merchant captains from 1855 and compiled marine observations. FitzRoy, who had recorded weather meticulously at sea, grew convinced that the data could do more than chart averages: it could warn of coming storms. He set up fifteen coastal stations that telegraphed observations to London at set hours, enabling the first synoptic charts — maps reducing lists of figures to a picture of the weather at a moment in time.
The Royal Charter storm and gale warnings
The catalyst for warnings was disaster. On the night of 25–26 October 1859, a storm described as the worst to hit the Irish Sea in the nineteenth century destroyed 133 ships and killed more than 800 people. Among them was the steam clipper Royal Charter, wrecked off Anglesey at the end of a two-month voyage from Australia with the loss of 459 lives — all but 41 of those aboard. FitzRoy believed many such losses could be prevented by timely warning: between 1855 and 1860 some 7,402 ships had been wrecked around Britain's coasts at a cost of 7,201 lives. He established a network of fifteen coastal stations from which visual gale warnings could be given to ships at sea, and in 1861 began the system of hoisting storm-warning cones at principal ports. The new electric telegraph made the service possible, carrying warnings faster than any tempest could travel. In the same year, 1861, the office began providing weather forecasts to newspapers — the first published forecasts, and the origin of the weather report as a staple of the British press.
Interruption, restoration and growth
FitzRoy's forecasts attracted scepticism and mockery as well as gratitude, and after his death in 1865 the Board of Trade judged that he had overstepped his remit: publication of forecasts ceased in May 1866. The respite was brief. Complaints arrived from merchant shipowners, naval captains and fishing fleets that had come to rely on the forecasts — analysis after his death found them about 70 per cent accurate — and forecasting resumed in April 1879. The institution, by then the Meteorological Office, grew with the technologies of the twentieth century: it became part of the Air Ministry after the First World War, supplied the forecasting on which military operations depended in the Second — most famously for the D-Day landings — and adopted computing earlier and more deeply than almost any public body, as numerical weather prediction replaced hand-drawn charts. Its history mirrors that of meteorology itself, from telegraphed observations to satellites.
The move to Exeter
For most of the twentieth century the Met Office was based at Bracknell in Berkshire. In 2003 it completed a move to a purpose-built headquarters in Exeter — described at the time as the biggest IT facilities relocation ever attempted in Europe. Around 1,100 staff, two supercomputers weighing two tonnes each and everything needed to run a 34,000-square-metre forecasting facility were transferred, without a second's break in service, because the office's output could not stop: at the time some 60 per cent of the world's airlines and many military activities depended on Met Office data, and British and American forces in the Gulf required extra services during the move itself. The Exeter headquarters, its general office space rated excellent for environmental performance, remains the operational heart of the service, manned 24 hours a day, seven days a week, all year round. The Met Office also maintains offices including a forecasting centre in Aberdeen and an office in Edinburgh supporting work with the Scottish Government.
Supercomputing at the heart of forecasting
Modern forecasting is computation. The Met Office collects observations from networks around the world — satellites, radar, aircraft, ships, buoys and land stations — and feeds them into numerical models that simulate the physics and chemistry of the atmosphere and oceans. Its leaders have described collecting more than 300 million observations every day and performing some 20 quadrillion calculations on its supercomputer; another account puts the daily analysis at 215 billion weather observations from around the world. In 2014 the government confirmed a £97 million Cray XC40 supercomputer, housed between the Exeter headquarters and the Exeter Science Park, which on reaching full capacity in 2017 could perform around 16 quadrillion calculations a second — roughly thirteen times more powerful than the system it replaced, with some 480,000 processor cores in a machine weighing about 140 tonnes. Each generation of computing power buys finer model resolution and forecasts that reach further into the future with usable accuracy.
Warnings, storm names and the media
The Met Office's most visible news role is the National Severe Weather Warning Service. Its colour-coded warnings — yellow, amber and red — for rain, wind, snow, ice, fog, extreme heat and thunderstorms are issued to government, emergency services and media, and are the trigger for much of Britain's severe-weather reporting. Since 2015 it has named storms in partnership with Ireland's Met Éireann, later joined by the Netherlands' KNMI, giving impactful Atlantic storms agreed names that structure media coverage and public communication. The service's public standing brings scrutiny as well as authority: famous forecasting episodes — a broadcaster's on-air dismissal of hurricane fears before the Great Storm of 1987, and the 'barbecue summer' expectation in a soggy 2009 — entered the national vocabulary, and the Met Office has itself noted that everyday successes go largely unnoticed while failures are remembered. Its response has been probabilistic forecasting and clearer communication of uncertainty, now standard in its media output.
Aviation, shipping and specialist services
Beyond the public forecast lies a large professional operation descended directly from FitzRoy's marine mission. The Met Office provides aviation weather reports used by airlines and air forces worldwide — working, for example, with a forecasting centre in Kansas in the United States on global aviation products — and its data underpins decisions on which passengers' safety and airlines' budgets depend. It issues shipping forecasts and gale warnings in the tradition of its 1861 cones; the shipping forecast itself, broadcast on BBC radio, has become a British cultural institution built on Met Office data. It serves defence, energy, transport, retail, insurance and water industries with tailored forecasts, and supports flood forecasting with the environment agencies. Its Hadley Centre, established in 1990, is a world-leading climate research unit whose work informs UK government policy and international climate assessments — making the Met Office a news source on climate change as well as tomorrow's rain.
Climate science and the long view
The Met Office's remit joins two timescales. Day to day, it predicts the weather; decade to decade, its climate programme records and projects how that weather is changing. Its long temperature series and climate models are cited whenever British media cover heatwaves, flood risk or emissions policy, and its scientists are among the most quoted in UK climate reporting. The connection is practical as well as scientific: the same observations network that feeds tomorrow's forecast builds the climate record, and the same supercomputers run both weather models and climate simulations. Parliament's Science and Technology Committee has pressed the case for continued investment in that computing capacity, citing the public benefits of accurate prediction, particularly for severe weather warnings — an argument governments have repeatedly accepted, funding successive generations of machines at Exeter.
Status, funding and accountability
The Met Office is an executive agency and trading fund of the UK government — in recent decades sponsored through the Ministry of Defence and then the business and science departments — which sells many of its services commercially while providing the public forecast and warnings as a public service. Demand for its output is intense: it has accounted for as much as a fifth of all government web traffic on a peak weather day. Its status means it is both a newsroom supplier and a public body subject to parliamentary and press scrutiny, a dual role visible whenever a warning is accused of coming too late or a forecast bust is examined. Through that scrutiny, its position as the single official voice for UK weather warnings remains the foundation of how British media organise severe-weather coverage.
The national weather service in British life
Few public institutions touch daily life as routinely as the Met Office. Its forecasts decide school runs and motorway gritting, race meetings and military sorties; its warnings close bridges, cancel trains and empty beaches; its storm names give the winter's weather a cast of characters the whole country discusses. All of that flows from the department FitzRoy founded in 1854 with three staff and a brief to improve wind charts. The Exeter headquarters now runs continuously, digesting global observations through supercomputers of national scale, yet the essential transaction is unchanged since 1861, when forecasts first went to newspapers: observations gathered at the coast and across the world, turned by science into a warning or a prediction, delivered to the public through the media. The Met Office remains, as it has been for more than 170 years, the place where British weather news begins.
