What really goes on at the Met Office?
As we wilt, they work – Joe Shute braves an amber warning to join the Met Office nerve centre for a day
Inside the Met Office’s national HQ, the heat is on. When the multi-million-pound glass and steel monolith was opened in 2003 – just off junction 29 of the M5, on the outskirts of Exeter – rather than traditional air conditioning, it was fitted with a cooling system that recycles the hot air produced by its computers. Energy efficient as it is, on days like these it can get a bit sticky for those working on the front line mapping Britain’s heatwave.
Still, with sleeves rolled up and faces flushed, they plough on – even as the office pot plants wilt. We are, after all, in the nerve centre of Britain’s national forecaster – and, even here, few have ever witnessed a summer quite like this.
This week, the Great British Heatwave of 2018 ramped up another gear, with the Met Office issuing a level three “amber heat health watch warning” that lasts until Friday. It urges people to stay out of the sun, as temperatures exceed 86F (30C) during the day in some places and hover around 59F (15C) at night.
The amber warning has prompted a raft of criticism, including that of Malcolm Bell, chief executive of Visit Cornwall, who described it as “nanny state with the biggest capital N you could possibly print”.
But Paul Gundersen, chief operational meteorologist for the Met Office, claims the advice has been misinterpreted. “It is meant for a specific group of people who are elderly or in ill health,” he explains, wearily. “It is not saying everybody should stay out of the sun.”
Gundersen is speaking from the heart of the Met Office’s operations centre, where the heatwave is playing out in real time on giant screens all around him. A team of 20 or so are staring at satellite loops, radar imagery and computer model outputs showing soaring temperatures all over Britain.
The cavernous HQ accommodates some 1,800 employees in total.
A few metres away, a colleague is monitoring live weather feeds of the entire globe, which depict similarly recordbreaking temperatures across the Northern Hemisphere stretching all the way to Japan. Another satellite feed shows an infra-red map of Britain, a black patch stretching all the way east from Dorset to the Humber represents what are currently the hottest parts of the country.
In the bowels of the building below us, Cray XC40 supercomputers – installed at a cost of £97million – quietly churn away in rows. Despite looking like vending machines, they are capable of making some 14,000 trillion arithmetic operations per second and allow the forecasting service to take in 215 billion weather observations from all over the world, every single day.
It is the job of Gundersen and his team to make sense of such a wealth of data. “It’s always interesting when you get close to extreme weather of any sort,” he says. “If you don’t find this interesting, then you are in the wrong job.”
What makes this year so unusual, he adds, is the length of the warm dry weather, which stretches all the way back to April. For much of England and Wales, last month ranked within the top five on record. Parts of East Anglia have now experienced 50 consecutive days with no rain. Unlike the famous summer of 1976 – previously the longest drought in living memory – this one spans much of the world, rather than just Britain. For Prof Peter Stott, who leads the climate monitoring and attribution team, 2018 is providing yet more solid proof of climate change.
“The evidence is now cast-iron solid that the world is warming and it is due to greenhouse gas emissions,” he says. “It is very frustrating when people try to construct what might look, to a naive eye, plausible sounding arguments. But they are usually cherry-picking data or constructing narratives that don’t accord with reality.”
The Met Office was founded in 1854 by Vice Admiral Robert Fitzroy as a service for mariners. Fitzroy coined the term “weather forecast” and created a system that relied upon data from 15 land stations and sent daily updates through a new telegraph system. Fitzroy Road, which leads to the modern HQ, is a nod to its origins. Today’s forecasters draw on data from 4,500 observational sources, including 16 operational radar and 330 monitoring stations in the UK, plus 19 satellites, and other national meteorological services around the world.
While the BBC has recently ended its 95-year relationship with the Met Office – in favour of international private forecasting company Meteogroup, in a cost-cutting exercise – the service still provides daily updates to news organisations including Sky and ITV, the Ministry of Defence and, in times of extreme weather, government. It also counts supermarkets among its customers, wanting to know how many sausages and salad bags to order in for the days ahead.
Mel Harrowsmith is head of civil contingencies and, during the ongoing spate of wildfires across the country, has been called upon to deliver high-level briefings on what the weather is going to do next. Despite taking the occasional dip off the Devon coast in recent weeks, the 38-year-old admits she is never truly off-duty. “As forecasters you never stop thinking about the weather,” she says. “You always know the other side of that coin.” Despite being ridiculed for previously wayward claims of barbecue summers, the staff here insist that their five-day forecast now is as accurate as a three-day one was two decades ago. Where once grids were mapped on vast squares ranging 85km by 75km, now they are monitored down to as little as 1.5km. In parts of London, such as Heathrow Airport, forecasters can pinpoint weather conditions down to 300m.
Still, Paul Gundersen admits, they would not dare claim infallibility. Predicting light rain remains the greatest challenge. “Showers can be almost random in the way they are distributed and quite small as well,” he says. “We can say there will be scattered showers across a region, but not exactly what towns will experience them. That comes down to probability on any given spot.”
As a nation we are obsessed with weather and according to Helen Chivers, a forecaster turned press officer who has worked for the Met
Extreme weather is interesting. East Anglia has now had 50 days with no rain
Office for the past 35 years, it is not uncommon to be cornered at a cocktail party for a chat about what is on the horizon.
“It is an occupational hazard,” she admits. Inside the office, however, “there is a definite buzz. Heatwaves like this don’t happen every day. Forecasters enjoy forecasting extreme conditions. It is a challenge to get the detail right,” she adds.
So what, then, is the prediction from Met Office HQ about when we might see some relief from this scorching summer?
A brief scan of the charts shows thunderstorms on Friday, a little cooler over the weekend and then, heading into August, the heatwave looks set to resume in earnest. Gunderson sighs, “I don’t think we’ve seen the back of this.”
Additional reporting by Joshua Burnand Witter