Met Office

The Met Office, previously the Meteorological Office until November 2000, is the United Kingdom's national weather and climate service. It is an executive agency and trading fund of the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology and is led by CEO Penelope Endersby, who took on the role as Chief Executive in December 2018 and is the first woman to do so. The Met Office makes meteorological predictions across all timescales from weather forecasts to climate change.
Although an executive agency of the UK Government, the Met Office supports the Scottish Government, Welsh Government and Northern Ireland Executive in their functions and preparations ahead of intense weather and planning for extreme weather alerts. Met Office policies can be used by each government to inform their planning and decision making processes. The Met Office has an office located in the Scottish capital, Edinburgh, and a forecasting centre in Aberdeen in the north–east of Scotland, which are some of the services used to help the Scottish Government with objectives such as climate change.

History

The Met Office was established on 1 August 1854 as a small department within the Board of Trade under Vice Admiral Robert FitzRoy as a service to mariners. The loss of the passenger vessel, the Royal Charter, and 459 lives off the coast of Anglesey in a violent storm in October 1859 led to the first gale warning service. FitzRoy established a network of 15 coastal stations from which visual gale warnings could be provided for ships at sea.
The new electric telegraph enabled rapid dissemination of warnings and also led to the development of an observational network which could then be used to provide synoptic analysis. The Met Office started in 1861 to provide weather forecasts to newspapers. FitzRoy requested the daily traces of the photo-barograph at Kew Observatory to assist in this task and similar barographs and as well as instruments to continuously record other meteorological parameters were later provided to stations across the observing network. Publication of forecasts ceased in May 1866 after FitzRoy's death but recommenced in April 1879.

Connection with the Ministry of Defence

Following the First World War, the Met Office became part of the Air Ministry in 1919, the weather observed from the top of Adastral House giving rise to the phrase "The weather on the Air Ministry roof". As a result of the need for weather information for aviation, the Met Office located many of its observation and data collection points on RAF airfields, and this accounts for the large number of military airfields mentioned in weather reports even today. In 1936 the Met Office split with services to the Royal Navy being provided by its own forecasting services.
It became an executive agency of the Ministry of Defence in April 1990, a quasi-governmental role, being required to act commercially.

Changes of ministry

Following a machinery of government change, the Met Office became part of the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills on 18 July 2011, and subsequently part of the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy following the merger of BIS and the Department of Energy and Climate Change on 14 July 2016.
Although no longer part of the MOD, the Met Office maintains strong links with the military through its front line offices at RAF and Army bases both in the UK and overseas and its involvement in the Joint Operations Meteorology and Oceanography Centre with the Royal Navy. The Mobile Met Unit are a unit consisting of Met Office staff who are also RAF reservists who accompany forward units in times of conflict advising the armed forces of the conditions for battle, particularly the RAF.

Locations

In September 2003 the Met Office moved its headquarters from Bracknell in Berkshire to a purpose-built £80m structure at Exeter Business Park, near junction 29 of the M5 motorway. The new building was officially opened on 21 June 2004 – a few weeks short of the Met Office's 150th anniversary – by Robert May, Baron May of Oxford.
It has a worldwide presenceincluding a forecasting centre in Aberdeen, and offices in Gibraltar and on the Falklands. Other outposts lodge in establishments such as the MetOffice@Reading at University of Reading in Berkshire, the Joint Centre for Hydro-Meteorological Research site at Wallingford in Oxfordshire, and there is a Met Office presence at Army and Air Force bases within the UK and abroad. Royal Navy weather forecasts are generally provided by naval officers, not Met Office personnel.

Forecasts

Weather forecasting and warnings

The Met Office issues Severe Weather Warnings for the United Kingdom through the National Severe Weather Warning Service. These warn of weather events that may affect transport infrastructure and endanger people's lives. In March 2008, the system was improved and a new stage of warning was introduced, the 'Advisory'.
The Met Office along with Irish counterpart Met Éireann introduced a storm naming system in September 2015 to provide a single authoritative naming system for the storms that affect the UK and Ireland. The first named storm under this system, Abigail was announced on 10 November 2015. In 2019, the Met Office and Met Éireann were joined by Dutch national weather forecasting service the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute.

Weather prediction models

The Unified Model, or UM, is the principal modelling suite used by the Met Office. Released in 1990, it is named as such for its ability to be run over a range of scales in space and time. The UM forms the basis of all operational Numerical Weather Prediction at the Met Office, for both deterministic and ensemble forecasts.
Deterministic forecasts include the UKV model which runs at resolution over the UK and in surrounding areas out to a maximum of 120hours. In addition is global deterministic forecast at resolution out to six days, which then provides the boundary conditions for the UKV model.
Ensemble forecasts are also run for both the UK and globally. The UK ensemble has 18 members and operates at a resolution out to five days, while the global ensemble runs at out to seven days. The global model also has 18 members, which then provide interpolated physics perturbations and necessary boundary conditions for the corresponding members of the UK ensemble.

Flood Forecasting Centre

Formed in 2009, the Flood Forecasting Centre is a joint venture between the Environment Agency and the Met Office to provide flood risk guidance for England and Wales. The Centre is jointly staffed from both parent organisations and is based in the Operations Centre at the Met Office headquarters in Exeter.

Scottish Flood Forecasting Service

In Scotland this role is performed by the Scottish Flood Forecasting Service, a joint venture between the Scottish Environment Protection Agency and the Met Office.

Seasonal forecasts

The Met Office makes seasonal and long range forecasts and distributes them to customers and users globally. The Met Office was the first climate and weather forecast provider to be recognised as a Global Producing Centre of long range forecasts by the World Meteorological Organisation and continues to provide forecasts to the WMO for dissemination to other national meteorological services worldwide.
Met Office research has broken new ground in seasonal forecasting for the extratropics and has demonstrated its abilities in its seasonal predictions of the North Atlantic Oscillation and winter climate for Europe and North America.

Supply of forecasts for broadcasting companies

One of the main media companies, ITV produce forecasts for ITV Weather using the Met Office's data and animated weather symbols.
The BBC used to use Met Office forecasts for all of its output, but on 23 August 2015, it was announced that the BBC would be replacing the Met Office with MeteoGroup, a competing provider, as part of the corporation's legal obligation to provide best value for money for the licence fee payers. The BBC still uses some Met Office data for certain forecasts, particularly severe weather warnings and the Shipping Forecast. In July 2025, the BBC announced that it would be partnering with the Met Office again in future.

World Area Forecast Centre

The Met Office is one of only two World Area Forecast Centres or WAFCs, and is referred to as WAFC London. The other WAFC is located in Kansas City, Missouri, and known as WAFC Washington. WAFC data is used daily to safely and economically route aircraft, particularly on long-haul journeys. The data provides details of wind speed and direction, air temperature, cloud type and tops, and other features.

Volcanic Ash Advisory Centre

As part of its aviation forecast operation the Met Office operates the London Volcanic Ash Advisory Centre. This provides forecasts to the aviation industry of volcanic ash clouds that could enter aircraft flight paths and impact aviation safety. The London VAAC, one of nine worldwide, is responsible for the area covering the British Isles, the north east Atlantic and Iceland. The VAAC were set up by the International Civil Aviation Organization, an agency of the United Nations, as part of the International Airways Volcano Watch. The London VAAC makes use of satellite images, plus seismic, radar and visual observation data from Iceland, the location of all of the active volcanoes in its area of responsibility. The NAME dispersion model developed by the Met Office is used to forecast the movement of the ash clouds 6, 12 and 18 hours from the time of the alert at different flight levels.

Air quality

The Met Office issues air quality forecasts made using NAME, the Met Office's medium-to-long-range atmospheric dispersion model. It was developed as a nuclear accident model following the Chernobyl accident in 1986, but has since evolved into an all-purpose dispersion model capable of predicting the transport, transformation and deposition of a wide class of airborne materials. NAME is used operationally by the Met Office as an emergency response model as well as for routine air quality forecasting. Aerosol dispersion is calculated using the United Kingdom Chemistry and Aerosols model.
The forecast is produced for pollutants and their typical health effects are shown in the following table.

Pollutant	Health Effects at High Level
Nitrogen dioxide Ozone Sulphur dioxide	These gases irritate the airways of the lungs, increasing the symptoms of those suffering from lung diseases.
Particulates	Fine particles can be carried deep into the lungs where they can cause inflammation and a worsening of heart and lung diseases

Decadal Predictions
The Met Office coordinates the production and collation of decadal climate prediction from climate centres around the world as part of its responsibilities as World Meteorological Organisation . These predictions are updated each year and a summary, the Global Annual to Decadal Climate Update is published each year.