Whether it is hail, thunder, rain or fine weather, tracking it and reporting on it are the meat and drink of staff at the Met Office. Now they are trialling service-oriented architectures to see what they can do to help.
So far, the signs are good, following successful initial trials on the potential of service-oriented architectures (SOA) with their primary helper, Borland, in attendance. Now, under the guidance of deputy technology director, David Underwood, they have moved to the next stage and are running a number of detailed SOA trials that should produce concrete results.
We spoke to Underwood about the role of the Met Office, the need for SOA applications to show real returns, and what this could mean for the Met Office.
Q: How is the Met Office set up? For example, who pays for it?
A: We are a Ministry of Defence [MoD] trading fund. We are wholly owned by the MoD on behalf of the government. But, because we are a trading fund, which we have been since 1996, we are required to recover all of our costs via trading.
What is the relationship with the MoD?
We have two relationships with the MoD: one as owner and one as a customer. We have many customer relationships across government, with people like Defra [Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs], the FCO [Foreign and Commonwealth Office] — all sorts of different agencies of government — in the same way that we have contracts with many commercial organisations, such as the CAA [Civil Aviation Authority].
We are targeted on making profits. We have to pay a dividend back to our owner.
In our climate model, it could be looking at 50 or 70 years ahead, as opposed to a day so
David Underwood, Met Office
We have been operating that way since 1996 and very successfully. The board also has representatives from stakeholders who have an interest, such as the CAA, who continue to make sure that the Met Office continues to serve government needs.
How about the public?
We also have a representative on the board of the Public Weather Service [PWS], which is the stuff you see through the BBC or ITV. That underpins the basic daily forecast. If you call in and ask: "What is the weather going to be like in my area?", that is produced by the PWS.
That is about delivering to the individual — you or I. It's a group independent of us and sponsored and funded by us, but they act independently and task us on behalf of the public. They do various forums and so on to make sure they have an up-to-date understanding of how people want to receive this information.
For example, in recent months, you may have noticed far more use of probabilistic displays, like a 60 percent or 80 percent chance of flooding or disruption. Now, these have been used by some of our users for decades but very much [by] those who manage on a risk basis. The traditional old forecast would have been deterministic. Now you see these probability curves.
Climate and climate change are seen by industry, government and the public as being more important now. Can you talk a little about the work that goes into creating the models for this?
The models are highly mathematical, coupled with a knowledge of the physics and chemistry that lie behind them. They tend to do a regular update of between six and 18 months, depending on the amount of changes being introduced. So we plan two or three years in advance as we eat up the technology — the capacity of the supercomputer to handle the calculations.
For example, we are about to go from 50 layers in the atmospheric model to 70. That places huge computational demands on the number required for creating an initial state because, as you increase the number of grid points, you will need to create our initial state of the atmosphere, which is the very start of the simulation.
In our climate model, it could be looking at 50 or 70 years ahead, as opposed to a day so. They are quite different cycles of development.
On the climate models, we are the customer for it because we are defining how the model will evolve. But, in different areas, the customer may be the public or defence sectors or an aviation customer or...
