Met Office
The Met Office is the UK's National Weather Service. It includes the Met Office Hadley Centre (MetO) with 180 employees who specialise in climate research and prediction to inform decision-making. The Met Office employs a total of 510 Scientists. The Met Office is a Trading Fund within the UK Government’s Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. This status engenders a business approach in addition to our R&D activities resulting in successful products and service delivery.
The Met Office has developed and delivered climate services within the UK and internationally for many years.
Users are from a variety of sectors including water, energy, health, transport, agriculture and tourism. These services inform decision-making for adaptation and mitigation to climate variability and climate change. The development of the Met Office’s Climate Service is a key strategic aim to satisfy customer requirements. Over the last few years the MetO has been at the forefront of research into climate variability and predictability; development of operational ensemble-prediction systems, derived applications and products for seasonal to decadal timescale.
The Met Office is highly active in numerous international climate service-related activities, including
- WMO’s GPCs for long-range forecasts. Outputs from these will be part of climate services in Europe;
- WMO’s key strategic activity to develop the Global Framework for Climate Services (GFCS): Involvement in writing the Implementation Plan being written for approval by WMO Extraordinary Congress;
- Climate Services Partnership (CSP): Co-organised the First International Conference on Climate Services in October 2011. This led to the creation of the CSP, where the Met Office has a seat on the Core Group.
- FP6 ENSEMBLES project: Co-ordinated by the Met Office. The footing for climate services in Europe.
- Other EU FP projects, e.g.: EUCLIPSE - Climate cloud processes; ERA-CLIM - Global climate re-analyses; ICE 2 SEA - Sea and sea-ice processes for climate; and COMBINE - Improvements in climate modelling.