Met Office science and technology

Felicity Liggins, Education Outreach and External Training Manager, Met Office

Since our foundation in 1854, the Met Office has pioneered the science of meteorology and its application. To this day, we continue to push the boundaries of science and technology, so that we can meet the demands of today and the future.

The early days of the Met Office built on Robert FitzRoy’s scientific ingenuity, but forecasting techniques took a great leap forward thanks to Met Office scientist Lewis Fry Richardson. In 1913, before the outbreak of WWI, Richardson was in charge of the Met Office’s Eskdalemuir Observatory in Scotland. While there, he started developing ideas on weather forecasting using mathematical methods. He believed the approach used at the time, where forecasters matched observations of current weather with patterns in past weather records to predict what might happen next, could be bettered by using a mathematical approach rather than past trends. When war broke out, Richardson left the Met Office to become an ambulance driver. However, he continued his work during this challenging time. He created a past-forecast for central Europe, taking weather observations made at the time and then applying mathematical principles to determine what the weather might be six hours ahead. To do this, he created a grid across the geographical area and solved equations to make his forecast. It wasn’t correct due to the limitations with the data, and it did take him more than six weeks to produce the forecast, but he wasn’t deterred.

Richardson rejoined the Met Office in 1920, and then just two years later published his now famous book, Weather Prediction by Numerical Process Richardson’s foresight was remarkable, and his approach of Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) started to become a practical reality using electronic computers after World War II. The first experimental NWP forecast in the UK using a computer was in 1952, but it was not until 1965 that operational computer forecasts were produced.

Since then, advances in computing technology, and our scientific understanding, have continued to have a significant influence on our forecasting processes. In April 2022 we announced the latest evolution in our ability to forecast our weather and climate: a multimillion-pound agreement with Microsoft for the provision of a new supercomputing capability, expected to be the world’s most advanced dedicated to weather and climate, plus it will operate on 100% renewable energy. We still use a grid as Lewis Fry Richardson did, but ours are now at far higher resolutions. In the same way a higher pixel count on a digital photograph gives a better picture of your subject, a higher resolution computer model can better resolve smallscale features such as convective storms which, although limited in geographic area, can be highly impactful weather events. A high-performing supercomputer also allows us to look out much further in time than the six hours of Richardson’s original prediction, with detailed forecasts up to seven days ahead, and other products extending the outlook to seasonal timescales.

A further evolution of Richardson’s approach is to run our computer model not just once, but many times to create ‘an ensemble’. As our atmosphere is a chaotic system, very small errors in the representation of its initial state in our model can lead to large errors in the forecast. This means that we can never create a perfect forecast system because we can never observe every detail of the atmosphere’s initial state. To test how these small differences in the initial conditions may affect the outcome of the forecast, our model is run multiple times creating an ensemble. By comparing these different forecasts, the forecaster can decide how likely a particular weather event will be. If the forecasts vary a lot then the forecaster knows that there is a lot of uncertainty about what the weather will actually do, but if the forecasts are all very similar they will have more confidence in predicting a particular event.

These advances in the science and technology underpinning our forecasting services enable us to produce detailed forecasts for the UK and beyond which can be used by many different customers, from governments to the military, from commercial organisations to civil protection agencies, from industry to people like you. Our aim is to help you stay safe and thrive, and our world-leading science and technology are at the heart of this vision, but we can’t do it without a whole range of people who are experts in weather science, operational meteorology, software, technology and engineering.

Opened in 1990, the climate research section of the Met Office, the Hadley Centre, was set up to explore whether we could predict the future changes in our climate, and the potential consequences of these changes. Met Office climate scientists seek to make predictions and projections about the potential future state of our climate and the impacts the changes may have, feeding in to the IPCC processes.

We offer a number of apprenticeships across our business at a variety of levels, and we will continue to grow the number we offer. Search ‘Met Office apprenticeships’ to find out more.