Met Office Citizen Weather Station Data Service

The Met Office is a world leader in providing weather and climate services. We are the UK’s National Meteorological Service and a Trading Fund within the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT), operating under set targets and returning a dividend. Recognised as one of the world’s most accurate forecasters, we use more than 10 million weather observations, an advanced atmospheric model and a high-performance supercomputer to create 3,000 tailored forecasts and briefings every day. These are delivered to a wide range of customers from the Government to businesses, the general public, armed forces, and other organisations. The Met Office has been operating the Weather Observations Website (WOW; https://www.wow.metoffice.gov.uk/) since 2012, enabling members of the public to submit their weather station observations and exploiting them as an increasingly important source of third party data for use in forecast applications. This data has been demonstrated to have a positive impact, in particular when incorporated into our high resolution mesoanalyses and nowcasting applications, measurably improving our ability to predict the weather over the UK. Going forward, there are plans to evaluate the impact of assimilating data in regional numerical weather prediction models, currently covering a “UKV” modelling domain equivalent to the British Isles and its surrounds. Our objective is to significantly increase the number primarily of observed near-surface measurements of a variety of meteorological parameters by utilizing data from citizen weather stations in near-real time, supplementing the data from the ~300 Met Office automatic weather stations in the UK.