Thanks to Andrea Bishop (Press Officer at The Met Office) for providing us with this guest blog for our space editorial month.
Sometimes, our work really is out of this world. Whilst most people know about our space weather forecasting from our popular aurora updates, the Met Office Space Weather Operations Centre (MOSWOC) forecasts far more impactful data. One of just a handful of 24/7 space weather prediction centres worldwide, we have forecasted and monitored thousands of space weather events over the past ten years, helping key industries take steps to manage the risks posed by our dynamic Sun.
Our MOSWOC team is constantly monitoring the Sun for space weather activity, including solar flares, solar radiation storms, and coronal mass ejections which lead to geomagnetic storms here on Earth. This work is crucial. Severe space weather events can significantly impact the UK’s critical national infrastructure, affecting satellites, power grids, and communications systems that we all rely on daily.
An independent report released last year suggests that the Met Office’s space weather capability will be worth over £600million to the UK over the next decade.
It’s an incredibly exciting space to work in, and the next decade will encapsulate huge leaps forward for global space weather forecasting, with a number of projects set to enhance international capability, including the launch of the European Space Agency Vigil mission, which will provide a side-on view of the Sun to enhance forecast accuracy.
Next-generation technology
And, of course, from out-of-space to under-the-sea, our critical weather services and world-leading climate science is all underpinned by cutting-edge technology. For our forecasts, we start with observations – 200 billion of them every day from satellites, surface stations, radiosondes and ocean buoys, and from those we generate 3000 forecasts daily, from our advanced atmospheric model and a supercomputer, which can perform 14000 trillion calculations per second.
AI is also opening up new ways to forecast better. Our experimental AI weather model FastNet, in partnership with the Alan Turing Institute, is now giving results comparable to our global model. This is just the tip of the iceberg of how we see ourselves using this transformative technology in the future, in our production, our products and our services.
This is world-changing work
Excellent people and culture are behind the exceptional science, technology and operations at the Met Office. We have teams working across the world and around the clock to help people make better decisions to stay safe and thrive.
You may well be familiar with our world-leading weather forecasts and climate projections, but did you know our tech and IT teams maintain the systems that deliver our science and services, helping people stay safe and be prepared for the future?
Whilst we have our core teams in Technology related to Architecture, Development, Delivery and IT Support, the roles are now so vast and varied that it is becoming impossible to characterise them into set ‘teams’. With over 30 different role types, and more emerging all the time, we are proud to be an agile team of experts who are evolving with, and often ahead of, the pace of technology change.
And as an organisation that pushes the boundaries of technology, we work with some of the best and brightest minds in the industry. A role here will find you working on cutting-edge developments, from supercomputing to cloud, and networks to machine learning. This also extends to partnerships with key collaborators in weather and climate. We also work across national boundaries to create an environment to share data, ideas and expertise – without which, we simply couldn’t do what we do.
We’re proud to be featured on Great Place to Work UK’s ‘Best Workplaces in Tech’ 2024 list – as well as being certified a ‘Great Place to Work’, reflecting feedback from staff who described the organisation as a safe, fun and caring environment where they feel proud to work.
Sound appealing? Find out about our latest opportunities here: https://careers.metoffice.gov.uk/
