Spotlight on the Technology team

Everything we do at the Met Office is underpinned and led by technology. From safety-of-life services to forecasting and communications, we provide critical services which help people make better decisions to stay safe and thrive. Our technological infrastructure is crucial to delivering the best in weather warnings and predictions to millions of people every day, across the globe and around the clock.

Here are a few projects that the technology team have been working on and how they contribute to the success of the Met Office and the people it supports.

Our supercomputer
Our new supercomputer, developed in partnership with Microsoft, is taking weather and climate forecasting to the next level. It is the world’s most advanced machine dedicated to weather and climate and is in the top 25 supercomputers in the world. The vast data it generates is used to provide more accurate warnings of severe weather, helping to build resilience and protect the UK population, businesses and infrastructure from the impacts of increasingly extreme storms, floods and snow. It is also being used to take forward ground-breaking climate change modelling, unleashing the full potential of the Met Office’s global expertise in climate science.

Operational Meteorology Products and Systems
Situational awareness is vital to the Met Office Operations Centre so that operational meteorologists know exactly what is going on in the world, based on observations from around the globe and from a range of both geostationary and low earth orbit satellites. This is complemented by access to vast amounts of numerical weather prediction data from our supercomputer. Meteorologists view these huge volumes of data using our state-of-the-art visualisation systems, which allow them to analyse the weather in real time to provide critical, safety-of-life products and services to the general public, media, blue-light services, military and businesses alike.

Cloud: Taking weather forecasting by storm
Met Office teams continuously adapt to changes in the technology landscape to make our services more cost-effective, resilient, and widely available. One significant change has been our gradual migration from on-premise IT to cloud hosting. Our key services are now primarily cloud-based, and our specialist teams work to ensure their security and cost-effectiveness while making use of the latest capabilities. We have even been able to influence the offerings of major cloud providers through our partnerships and unique expertise in managing large geospatial datasets. This has been an exciting and transformative journey for us.

Delivering weather warnings
Leveraging some of the latest tools available on Amazon Web Services (AWS), our Agile software engineering teams develop systems which underpin the core purpose of our organisation: to help people stay safe and thrive. We constantly seek opportunities to innovate, driven by user research and delivering secure and resilient solutions. The National Severe Weather Warning Service (NSWWS) is one of several services we offer to inform people about what the weather is likely to do in terms of impacts, making it real and driving better decision-making. When severe weather is in the forecast, communicating this rapidly and effectively relies on the work of our expert technologists as well as our operational meteorologists. By ensuring the interoperability of our systems, we're able to get the message out to emergency responders, industry, and the public in a matter of minutes when it matters the most.

Interested in a world-changing career?
We’re always interested in talking to talented technologists, so why not take a look at the vacancies that we currently have on offer? Or register for our job alerts service and we’ll let you know as and when a new vacancy in technology becomes available.