Met Office

The Met Office is the UK’s meteorological organisation and was founded in 1854. The organisation is responsible for the UK’s national weather forecasting, and their Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research is a world-leading climate research centre.

We spent two days visiting the Met Office making observations of the working environment and speaking to people who work in a range of different roles, but primarily with climate data. We also spoke to a number of Met Office people on the phone, and chatted with a former senior policy maker – now government adviser – who had been involved with trying to ‘open’ weather data held by the Met Office.

Read through the ‘Data journey’, ‘Culture’, ‘R&D’ and ‘Policy’ pages below to find out more. Quotes have been taken from the audio recordings listed in the Archival sources list below.

The R&D page has more about the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research and two innovative Met Office projects (WOW and ACRE). The people who work in these sections process and use data that flows into the Met Office from various sources including Weston Park, Old Weather, Amateur Observers and the Climatic Research Unit.

Learn more

The next stations are:

• IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change)

• Weather market data supplier

Or, if you are interested in data that are flowing into the Met Office from other locations go to:

• Old Weather

• Amateur observers

• Climatic Research Unit

Archival sources

• Transcript of interview with MO_1 (pending)

• Transcript of interview with MO_2

• Transcript of interview with MO_3 (pending)

• Transcript of interview with MO_4

• Transcript of interview with MO_5 (pending)

• Transcript of interview with MO_6 (pending)

• Transcript of interview with MO_7 (pending)

• Observation photographs taken at Met Office

Reflections

Take a minute to reflect on some of the things you have read in this section.

Some questions to get you started:

• How do the different cultural values and practices across the Met Office compare with one another, and other stations you have visited?

• What are your thoughts on Met Office scientists using citizen science generated data from projects such as Old Weather and the WOW project to understand better the weather and climate?

• How do you think the fusion of business and science in the Met Office impacts upon the processing and flow of data through the institution?

• What do you think about the Met Office being run as a commercial business that sells data and services to other organisations?

• What do you think about the Met Office open data policy? Should it open its historic weather data?