Met Office

The Met Office (officially the Meteorological Office until 2000) is the United Kingdom's national weather service. It is an executive agency and trading fund of the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and a member of the Public Data Group. The chief executive is Rob Varley and the chief scientist is Dame Julia Slingo. The Met Office makes meteorological predictions across all timescales from weather forecasts to climate change. The Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research and the National Meteorological Library and Archive are part of the Met Office. At the Met Office headquarters at Exeter in Devon is the Met Office College, which handles the training for internal personnel and forecasters from around the world.

History

The 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 loss of the passenger vessel, the Royal Charter, and 459 lives off the coast of Anglesey in a violent storm in October 1859 led to the first gale warning service. In 1861 FitzRoy had established a network of 15 coastal stations from which visual gale warnings could be provided for ships at sea.