11 Facts About Met Office

The Met Office makes meteorological predictions across all timescales from weather forecasts to climate change.

Met Office was established in 1854 as a small department within the Board of Trade under Vice Admiral Robert FitzRoy as a service to mariners.

The Met Office started in 1861 to provide weather forecasts to newspapers.

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.

In 2019, the Met Office and Met Eireann were joined by Dutch national weather forecasting service the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute.

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Main role of the Met Office is to produce forecast models by gathering information from weather satellites in space and observations on earth, then processing it with a variety of models, based on a software package known as the unified model.

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.

Met Office is one of only two World Area Forecast Centres or WAFCs, and is referred to as WAFC London.

Until 2001 the Met Office hosted the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change working group, chaired by John Houghton, on climate science.