| 1 The Met Office was formed in 1854, as a small department of the Board of Trade, to provide weather and sea-current information to the Royal Navy and maritime community. 2 The Met Office employs 1,700 staff at over 40 UK locations and overseas. 3 The Met Office is one of only two World Area Forecast Centres that provide high-level weather forecasts. It prepares weather information for all international flights in the area from the eastern North Atlantic to central Australia. 4 The Met Office's Mobile Met. Unit sends staff to support military operations all over the world. Forecasters and observers are part of the RAF Reserve and are currently 'in theatre' across the Middle East and at three bases in the Former Republic of Yugoslavia. 5 The Met Office maintains the National Meteorological Library and Archive which is one of the most comprehensive collections on meteorology anywhere in the world. Open to the public, it currently holds around one-third of a million books, articles and reports. 6 Close to 100 TV forecasts are broadcast from the BBC Weather Centre each and every day. 7 The Met Office Hadley Centre, part of the Met Ofice, is a world-renowned centre for climate research. The research it does informs government on climate change to provide the basis of UK policy on the reduction of greenhouse gases under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. 8 The Met Office contributes more than £10 million annually to the European space programme. Europe has four geostationary satellites in space. Its first polar-orbiting satellite was launched in October 2006. 9 Daily weather forecasts for between three and 10 days ahead use an 'ensemble' of 50 model runs plus a control - each based on slightly differing initial conditions - to establish the confidence of our predictions. 10 Each day 10 million observations from all over the world are used to drive our atmospheric models and 100,000 million pieces of information are processed within the models. |
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