By Anne Pond
Another early start on 3 June 2013 for a group of us, leaving Falmouth at 7.30 am we were on our way to the Met Office in Exeter. Once again Phil was after his Costa coffee and with time to spare we met up at the M5 services at Exeter for coffee and cake. The drive up was good with lots of sunshine – thank you to the Met Office for arranging this for us!
We were warmly welcomed at the reception by the Met Office staff; where screens on the wall displayed the current weather patterns over the UK and the forecast for the following 24 hours. Once signed-in we were taken through to the library and introduced to the team and given our agenda for the day. Our visit started with a tour of the building. The Met Office moved from Bracknell to its current site in September 2003. Built on a green belt site on the edge of Exeter, fully funded by the Government, built on time and within budget. The building is on 3 floors and running through the middle is an open space known as The Street; where people meet, chat and have coffee. The Met Office previously came under the MoD but since July 2011 became part of the Department for Business Innovation and Skills, and operates on a commercial basis.
The tour started at the Hadley Centre, which is a world leader in climate research. Next, the Operations Centre where information comes in from Europe, NOAA and many locations worldwide and models of weather patterns are analysed and passed on to give forecasts for aviation, marine, UK weather forecasting and forecasting for events and much more. The shipping forecast comes from Aberdeen.
The Met Office operates 24 hours day, 365 days a year, has two separate electricity supplies (in case one supply goes down) and an IBM 775 Superhuman computer; developed for high performance computing for weather and climate modelling. It has the capacity to make more than 100 trillion calculations a second and takes in hundreds of thousands of weather observations from all round the world used then as a starting point for analysing weather patterns. The first computer used in 1959 was capable of 30,000 calculations a second. Weather forecasting has come a long way in 50 years. The Met Office, currently number one, is proud to be ranked in the top two in the world, with Japan (who has similar climatic conditions to the UK).
Travelling the seas you will see yellow weather buoys similar to ODAS22 (Ocean Data Acquisition System). This type of buoy gathers scientific data on local sea conditions such as water temperature, air pressure and temperature, wind speed and direction, average wave height and period. After lunch we were given a tour of the library and the archives which hold one of the most comprehensive collections on meteorology in the world. The Met Office was opened in 1854 and in the library is an exhibition of meteorological equipment and artefacts used throughout the 150 years of its existence. Available to the public is a wealth of journals and books including the UK Daily Weather reports back to 1869. If required, you can request the meteorological report for a specific day. Fact sheets and guides are available in the library and on the website, in PDF format, on subjects such as The Shipping Forecast, Interpreting Weather Charts, Clouds and the Beaufort Scale. Historical weather fact sheets are available for certain events such as the Penlee lifeboat disaster, D-Day, departure day for RMS Titanic and coming up to current day with the Royal Wedding in 2011.
We then walked across to where the archives are deposited, in a separate building; shared with the Devon Heritage Centre. The Met Office has four repositories with a wealth of archive material including synoptic weather charts, daily index cards on rainfall and ships meteorological logs including historic voyages such as HMS Beagle, on which Darwin sailed with Captain FitzRoy to the Galápagos Islands in 1837. Several documents were made available for us to look at including the weather records of Scott’s Antarctic expedition from 1911, showing a fascinating drawing of a gramophone and candle set up as an alarm system to wake them when they were sleeping, a register of weather observations for Falmouth, an account of John Narborough’s voyages and discoveries to the Straights of Magellan, the South Seas, Greenland and Spitsberg, published in 1694 and the original Beaufort Scale.
We all had a fascinating experience and an enjoyable time.
