Met Office overhaul can't promise better weather

The Met Office is overhauling its legacy messaging system to enable it to process the increasing amounts of observational data used for weather forecasts more quickly.

As part of a £350,000 deal with IT services company Parity, the Met Office is creating a highly resilient database on an Oracle 9i and Hewlett Packard platform.

The existing system, which is used for processing meteorological data from around the world into formats that can be used to prepare weather forecasts, is based upon fault tolerant Tandem NonStop servers running bespoke applications.

Paul Cowley, senior project manager at the Met Office, told silicon.com the increasing amount of information from automated observation posts meant it was taking longer to transform the data into internationally accepted formats.

"The World Meteorological Organisation, which is under the UN's auspices, is a body which co-ordinates the activities of national weather services. We exchange data in agreed formats internationally."

He said it is now much faster to process the data for the Met Office's forecasters and weather prediction supercomputer.

"We are the leaders in the world at short period forecasting and one of the bottlenecks that was coming up was being able to get enough data flowing from our outfield to our forecasters at a high enough rate. We were limited with our current equipment to one report an hour and now we can actually increase that to one every ten minutes," he said.

The main benefit for the Met Office of the new messaging system will be the ability to make the most of its weather data, said Cowley.

"It's not as glamorous as a super computer system but on the other hand if you don't get the data in the formats you want you aren’t going to be able to produce the forecasts."