The Met Office is planning fundamental changes to its IT infrastructure to help make more accurate weather predictions.

The UK government’s weather prediction service wants to revamp its IT to support its software development business and give its scientists greater computing power for research work.

Alan Radford, programme manager for technology research and development at the Met Office, says events such as the Year 2000 preparations and a move from the organisation’s Bracknell headquarters to Exeter in 2003, meant the Met Office has failed to invest sufficiently in its IT infrastructure.

‘The IT projects that have been done have been done out of necessity and mounted on the existing architecture, so it is a bit of a mess,’ said Radford.

‘We want to rationalise all that and bring in modern ways of doing things, such as a service oriented architecture (SOA). We are piloting that to see if it will do the job for us.’

The Met Office wants to use SOA to make it flexible enough to meet new business demands and increase the interoperability of its software.

The organisation has many ‘stovepipe’ applications that are doing similar things in different ways, leading to unnecessary duplication of development work.

‘A lot of the products that the Met Office produces are map-based,’ said Radford.
‘With SOA we can make use of one web mapping service that would do all of that for us.’

The Met Office is also procuring a supercomputer system, which it wants to install in 2008 or 2009, to replace its high performance system.

The new supercomputer will allow the Met Office to increase the accuracy of its forecasts on a day-to-day basis, says Radford.

‘We are looking to get a system powerful enough to predict severe weather events, such as the Boscastle floods, improve our climate forecasting and impact assessment work,’ he said.

‘We also want to run ensemble forecasts, where we do lots of model runs with slightly different conditions, to try to gauge uncertainty and possible outcomes in the atmosphere.’

On the more mundane level of ordinary computing, the Met Office is also pushing forward with upgrades and improvements to its desktop environment, by upgrading 1,400 Windows desktops with Service Pack 2 (SP2).

Sam Green, head of the Windows IT team at the Met Office, says the SP2 installation was among the projects that had to be delayed when the organisation moved to Exeter.

‘We installed the SP2 system in conjunction with supplier Altiris. We are using it to manage the system better than before, cutting down on the admin the IT teams have to do,’ he said.

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