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Met Office Awards for Excellence

Category: Awards

Met Office Awards for Excellence

The Met Office is one of the world's leading scientific research bases, and the world's top publisher of climate change data. A lot of people think that they just do our weather forecasts, but it couldn't be further from the truth: This place literally blew us away.

We rolled up to their Exeter building and got through the MOD security. There are around 1500 people working here, some of them flying research aircraft, labs that make and test equipment, property teams that manage their 200 or so field instrument sites, and a huge steel-reinforced, fireproofed section completely on lockdown, doing the essential, national security and military meteorology. You're not allowed in, they're not allowed out - if there's a fire, they sit it out in their fireproofed rooms until the next shift takes over. Hardcore.

They have a supercomputer the size of Rapanui HQ that has its own connection to the national grid, and despite some world-class energy efficiency measures, still needs around three times as much power as the Scilly Isles to operate.

This is the place where the smart kids from school end up - we were lucky enough to watch the chief forecasters working on this week's storm warnings for Scotland, watching the weather track in and issuing their alerts - then 5 minutes later seeing it go up on BBC news on the big screen TV. Upstairs there's a secret place too where there is no noise, and the worlds brightest minds are gathered up, given a budget and left alone to do research: the world-famous Hadley centre.

For a bunch of weathermen, this place is very, very cool - we were speechless really - think Michael Fish meets 007.

Awards for Excellence.

Around Christmas each year, the whole of the Met Office come together in the atrium of their building (there's a river that runs through it, really) for an internal awards do. We were invited up to present the award for best scientific / business achievement. The winner was a cross-departmental team who'd made a tool called virtual Met Mast. Their work makes it easier for Wind farm developers to predict energy yields at a new site. This is usually a p.i.t.a.  It will make it faster and cheaper to find new sites and bring the price of renewable energy down. Massive contribution to renewable energy, and their product had made £300k of sales already this year which went straight back in the public pot. Skills.

It was about four years ago in a renewable energy class that a conversation with a Met Office scientist about climate change inspired us to do something about it. We realised that the science was so much more advanced, and cooler, than people realise - but it's hard to know this with all the other things going on in our lives, like facebook and tv.  So maybe that's how we could help - making this more accessible. This visit was like going full circle in a way, going back to the Met Office and meeting the same people, who are still doing the same great work: With our New Met Office collection our job is to take that work and package it up into a cool, wearable, buyable product that can help communicate, reach out and spread that work to the public - whilst feeding money back into sustainable industries.

The one thing that made us realise why this place is special was the weather room. Seeing the forecasters working frantically to get their weather warnings out to the public put their work in perspective: yes they're very smart people. But these 1500 people in a building in Exeter are there because they want to protect you and I, and make our lives easier and safer.

We're looking forward to another great year working with the Met Office with some new limited edition products available, and more on their way, and we'll never look at a weather forecast the same way again.

 

 

 

 

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