Recently I and a colleague paid a business visit to the Met Office, which is headquartered in Exeter, Devon. It was the first time I had visited the new premises. (Previously the Met Office HQ was based in Bracknell, Berkshire.) I found an impressive new building, light and airy, with good facilities for a professional community, some of whom you would find at work all hours of the day.
After our meeting we were given a VIP tour of the machine rooms that now house some of the most advanced super computers and storage in the world. At one point I asked our guide, "Is there another machine room like this in the UK?" to which he replied, "Yes, it's just across the corridor," which is their back-up system.
I was told how the current system runs a global model of weather systems, to a level of detail of 40 square kilometres across the entire surface of the earth and to some 50 levels in the atmosphere above it. The new capability will increase this level of detail to 25 kilometre squares at 70 levels(!). The numbers I was given made my head spin. I'd heard of terabytes, but now I had been introduced to petabytes - a 1,000 terabytes - apparently the only sufficient unit now to measure the required processing capacity of the Met Office systems.
All kinds of organisations now buy forecasting services from the Met Office, from the NHS to the farming industry. No plane in the northern hemisphere takes off without a forecast from the Met Office. This saves untold amounts of fuel as aircraft can reduce loads to the optimal levels.
Then we were taken into the operations centre. The picture here doesn't do justice to the the impressive banks of screens we saw and the quiet buzz of Meteorologists going about their business.
My colleague and I came away feeling deeply impressed and proud of a British capability like this that is having a profound global impact for the good.
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