1854: The Met Office is founded to
provide information on the weather and marine currents to the
marine community. This small department of the Board of Trade
is headed by Vice-Admiral Robert
FitzRoy, RN.
1861: The first international meteorological
congress in Vienna founded an International Meteorological
Organization to further essential international co-operation.
This eventually transformed into the World
Meteorological Organization (WMO), a specialised agency
of the United Nations.
1909: Transatlantic shipping starts
to use wireless telegraphy to transmit weather messages ashore.
1912: Rapid developments in meteorology
lead to the establishment of the first outstation at South
Farnborough to give advice to pilots.
1914: Lewis
Fry Richardson conceives forecasting can be carried out
using numerical techniques. He imagines 64,000 people carrying
out calculations in a vast hall and comments:
"Perhaps some day in the dim future it will be possible
to advance the computations faster than the weather advances.
But that is a dream". By 1965 numerical forecasts produced
operationally as routine.
1922: Forecasts are first broadcast
by BBC radio.
1939: Radiosondes are launched to
gather observations from the upper air — a collection
of balloon-borne sensors transmit data on pressure, temperature
and humidity to receiving sites on land.
1944: The D-Day landings are planned
but are postponed due to bad weather. Group Captain Stagg,
the RAF's chief meteorologist (and a Met Office employee) informs
General Eisenhower on 5 June that a 36-hour 'weather window'
is imminent. President Truman later said: "The day selected
for the continental assault was probably the only day during
the month of June on which the operations could have been launched".
1953: A severe depression and storm
surge in the North Sea causes catastrophic flooding in south-east
England. This leads to planning and eventual construction of
the Thames Barrier and the development of the Met Office's
Storm Tide Forecasting Service.
1954: The first live BBC Television
forecast, lasting five minutes, was made by Met Office forecaster George
Cowling.
1962: Her Majesty the Queen performs
the official opening ceremony of the new Headquarters at
Bracknell. The Met Office takes delivery of its first electronic
computer so that numerical forecast techniques can be applied
operationally.
1964: The first operational cloud
pictures from satellites are available.
1977: European weather satellite,
Meteosat 1 is launched. This collaborative project will in
time provide a major input to the numerical models.
1981: The Met Office's first supercomputer — the
Cyber 205 — is installed to run the new 15-level atmospheric
model. The airborne spread of foot-and-mouth disease to livestock
on the south coast of England is predicted.
1982: The first global operational
forecasting model is introduced to assist in operations for
the Falklands War.
1984: World Area Forecasting Centre
status for aviation is accredited to the Met Office; one of
only two world centres for civil aviation.
1987: A severe storm inflicts major
damage to large areas of southern and south-east England. It
leads to a review of forecasting methods and the development
of the National Severe Weather Warning Service.
1990: The Met Office becomes an
Executive Agency of the Ministry of Defence. The Met
Office Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research
is opened.
1991: A Cray Y-MP supercomputer
is installed and, for the first time, a single numerical model
(merging ocean and atmosphere) is used for climate and weather
prediction.
1996: A network of European national
meteorological services (EUMETNET) is established with the
help of the Met Office. The Met Office becomes a Trading Fund.
1998: Volcanic activity in Iceland
releases vast quantities of ash into the atmosphere. The Met
Office's dispersion model successfully predicts how it will
behave and so averts aircraft disasters.
2002: The Met Office provides guidance
and support to senior planners and operational staff for Operation
Veritas in Afghanistan. The Mobile Meteorological Unit is deployed
to theatre.
2004: The Met Office's new headquarters in
Exeter are officially opened and fully operational. The move
from Bracknell is probably the largest move of an operational
computer complex in Europe, and is carried out on time and
within planned costs.
2005: Stabilisation 2005 Conference
held at the Met Office in Exeter. The world's leading climate
scientists gathered under one roof to discuss vital climate-change
issues. |
