The Met Office is the United Kingdom's national weather and climate service, an executive agency and trading fund of the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology. It is an institution that makes meteorological predictions across all timescales, from daily weather forecasts to climate change projections.
The institution was formed on August 1, 1854, as a small department within the Board of Trade, initially known as the Meteorological Office until November 2000. It was founded by Vice Admiral Robert FitzRoy as a service to mariners. The problem it was created to solve was the high loss of life and property at sea; a major catalyst was the sinking of the passenger vessel Royal Charter in a violent storm in October 1859, which led to the first gale warning service. FitzRoy established a network of coastal stations for visual gale warnings and, using the new electric telegraph, began disseminating warnings and developing an observational network. The Met Office started providing weather forecasts to newspapers in 1861.
The Met Office works by running a vast observations network and using supercomputing technology to create accurate weather forecasts and climate science. It collects and processes massive amounts of data, using Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP), a technique based on the work of Met Office scientist Lewis Fry Richardson in 1922, which was put into operational practice with the purchase of its first computer in 1959.
The Met Office is one of only two World Area Forecast Centres (WAFC), referred to as WAFC London, which provides data for safely routing aircraft globally. It connects to international concepts like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), to which it provides evidence on climate change. It also supports the UK government with the UK Climate Change Risk Assessment. A recent change was the loss of its contract to provide the BBC weather forecast in 2018, which it had delivered since 1922.