A brief background on the Met Office and its business.

A brief background on how the met office started –

The Met office was founded by the Vice Admiral Fitzroy in 1854. Fitzroy was inspired to build a company, which could predict and transfer weather information to prepare ships for the worst, or to tell them it was going to be smooth sailing. He was inspired by the death of a ship and its crew to a ravage storm out at sea.

The first headquarters was established in London in 1869 to 1910, Fitzroy sadly committed suicide in 1863 and did not get to see his idea expand to such lifesaving points.

The second headquarters was at Dunstable in Bedfordshire operating under the Board of Trade until1962 when they moved to Bracknell operating under the (MOD)RAF.

Their latest move was to Exeter in 2001 operating as a Government Agency, the move had to be spread over 3 years due to the size of the organisation.

How it operates.

Read more in History
« How Insurance Came to be
Buzzwords in the Business, the Third 25 (51-75) »

The Secretary of State for defence owns the Met office. He is accountable to Parliament for the agency and decides the policy within which the agency operates by setting its objectives and targets. The Met offices main customers are the armed forces, and other core customers are the Civil Aviation Authority and DEFRA. Under government rules these organisations buy their data from the MET office and the MET office has to supply them at an agreed market rate.

Areas of work

The Met office has many sectors of work and these cover the following areas:

  • Science (physics & chemistry)
  • Geography
  • Electronics
  • Software engineering
  • Trading
  • Development
  • Communications

The main sectors of engineering in the Met office are Software, telecommunications, and Electronic engineering.

For example the Met office needs different sensors for each type of weather reading, (wind, air pressure, humidity, temperature or rainfall). Because this is a very specialised market area there are not many company’s which could supply the different types of sensors needed, therefore the Met office produces some of its own to the appropriate accuracy. Software is also produced within the Met office. Software is one of the main engineering sectors because it is created to control the electronics through to the sensors; it can receive the information and produce graphs automatically.

Finance and business

The Met office has its own income so that it can prosper but is always under the control of the government who are its owner.

The Met office must finance itself and to do this it uses one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world to generate forecasts to customer’s exact requirements. Some examples of its customers are large supermarket chains, airlines, shipping companies and the general public where the service is paid for through the TV license. These are apart from the main core customers mentioned earlier.

A great advantage of the type of business the Met office runs is that it is a specialised area and there is very little competition, but this does not mean it can charge what it wants because it is governed by parliament.

The disadvantage of this type of business is that there has to be a lot of investment in land and equipment to gather the raw data but because the Met office began a long time ago there was a lot of land owned when it was directly under MOD control and the Met office kept it from back when it changed to an agency, so land is not a major problem. The equipment is a bigger problem because of time dating the technology and the Met office has to keep updating to satisfy the accuracy of their readings, but much of the equipment has been kept and is still used today such as in the weather radars, which have hardware from the 1970’s.