Weather Station Data Services

This is an early market engagement activity. This notice is an information gathering exercise rather than a call for competition, and therefore publication or response does not commit the Met Office or any respondents to a future procurement, nor provide any process exemptions or preferential treatment to any parties expressing an interest. The Met Office will not be liable for costs incurred by any interested party in participating in this exercise.

The Met Office has been operating the Weather Observations Website (WOW; 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.

WOW is reaching end of life and is no longer cost efficient, so the WOW Next project is exploring options to replace this capability with a new data-focused service. We are not looking to replace the service in a like-for-like way as the business need has changed, so we welcome alternative suggestions for provision of our requirements.

Our requirements are threefold:

1. We are initially looking to replace the WOW dataset with an alternative but equivalent automatic weather station (AWS) dataset. This needs to have similar characteristics to the WOW data (including measured variables, quality, spatial and temporal resolution, reporting frequency and timeliness). WOW currently provides us with approximately 1700 sites across the UK and Ireland, and we are looking to source data from a similar, or greater, number of low cost AWSs, such as those operated by members of the public, or organisations with an interest in the weather, with a good distribution across the UK.
2. To explore the potential of procuring ‘data as a service’ from a third-party provider, who possesses the capability to ingest and expose various Automatic Weather Station (AWS) data sources. These sources of data could be quite varied and will include public and/or private sector weather networks. Initially, we plan to use data sourced in requirement 1, but we envisage that it will, over time, expand to encompass other sources.
3. To develop a webform or interface webpage that could be used to allow our Voluntary Climate Network (VCN) of observers to report manual weather readings on a daily basis, as is currently the practice via WOW.

We are looking for information from organisations that may be able to support us by supplying some or all aspects of the three requirements listed above.

We are specifically looking for organisations to detail their capabilities in this market, to help us to understand what options may be available to us in determining the optimal solution(s) in terms of cost, quality, and sustainability.

We will review what we have received from vendors to establish whether there is common ground, themes, trends. We will look at the IT security and data protection & licensing information which will guide how we set our requirements. Specifically, we are trying to unearth any areas that could be a problem or limiting factors on being able to achieve what we want to, so we can put measures in place to address those before issuing a tender, rather than being surprised at the tender return stage and wasting supplier’s time.

If you’d like to submit a response to us on any of the elements described, please do so by the 28th June 2024.

Our full requirements are available to view via procontract.due-north.com ↗ together with a copy of the previous early market engagement for reference.