What do we want from the Met Office and the BGS?
A thread started at the request of “weatherman”: what info precisely do we want from
- the UK Met Office (as I think it’s corrrectly called now) – and perhaps the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasting (page points to datasets held by the ECMRWF) (the Hadley Centre? is it owned and/or funded by multiple governments?)
- the British Geological Survey?
And what useful data do they already provide for free?
Comments welcome.
- The following posts may be related...(the database guesses):
- Which organisations should we be chasing? Let's make a list.. (16 March 2006; score: 6.29%)
- Who's who after the reshuffle (12 July 2007; score: 6.11%)
- |In Thursday's Guardian: want to know where post offices are? Sorry, we can't (or won't) tell yoyu (13 October 2007; score: 6.02%)
- Yes, why minister? (9 January 2008; score: 5.91%)
- How the Met Office lost millions of pounds trying to compete with the private sector (1 June 2006; score: 5.83%)
March 23rd, 2006 at 9:45 pm
Re information from the UKMO.
All output from all numerical weather forecast, nowcasting, flood, oceanographic and climate models, including but not limited to ouputs from:
>The Global Model (also know as the Unified Model)
>The UK Mesoscale Model
>The North Atlantic and European Model,
>Gandalf severe weather nowcasting system
>Nimbus nowcasting rainfall/flash flood prediction system
>Regional and mesoscale models covering other parts of the globe, where the development and running costs of such models have been/are partly or entirely directly or indirectly financed by the UK tax payer.
Important: All output from each run of all models to be made available at full temporal and geospatial resolution for the entire model forecast period (in essence exactly the same information that is available to UKMO forecasters) as well as temporal and geospatial subsets of this information at lower resolution.
All observational data including and not limited to:
>Radiosonde (balloon) sounding observations
>Windprofiler observations (some currently available)
>Observational data from UKMO run weatherstations
>Remote sensing satellite derived observations/information
>Data collected from the UKMO run radars covering the British Isles
>Observations from pollution monitoring sites
>Sferic (lightning) strike locations from the UKMO Sferic detection network
Important: Latest observational information to be made available to the public without anuy time delay, at exactly the same time and in exactly the same form as UKMO forecasters first have access to it.
Also, the Cheif Forecaster’s internal guidance bulletins for the interpretation of the present weather pattern, expected weather hazards, and outputs of the above models, for all parts of the world where such guidance is issued for.
The above is not to be considered a definitive list.
March 24th, 2006 at 10:43 am
Re: Information currently available free from the UKMO.
The short answer is very little directly and only a little more via third parties.
If you visit the UKMO website you will see that there are some summary forecasts for the next few days, a few postage stamp-sized graphics depicting rainfall radar information (however, the information displayed is deliberately time delayed. If you want more recent information you must pay), a few postage stamp sized satellite images (again supplied with significant delay ie they are out of date). Also, some rather brief warming issued as and when necessary of severe weatehr or forecast severe weather.
Via third parties, eg the USA’s NOAA server or websites of fourth parties obtaining this information from the NOAA servers
one can obtain what are termed fax-charts depicting the forecast evolution of the synoptic pattern across the North Atlantic and Europe/North Africa for the next 132hours from model run initialisation. These charts are crown copyright.
The UKMO also under World Meterological Organisation internation treaty releases a limited amount of model output from the UKMO’s Global Model. However, the output from the GM released is not at full temporal and horizontal and vertical spatial resolution and is only available for the period T+72 hours beyond the initialisation of the latest run of the Global Model. The Global model is run to at least T+144 hours.
Under WMO treaty, the UKMO also releases a limited amount of observational data, including that from some weather stations and also from radiosonde (balloon) soundings. However, at least wrt the data collected by soundings, this data is not released as soon as it is recieved.
A limited amount of information of limited use, can also be obtained from meteorological websites run by the US Military (USAF) and some US Universities. However, with respect to the latter, these only have access to information released under WMO treaty.
I can not emphasise enough the importance of releaseing data recieved or model output as soon as it is is generated. The longer the delay the less use the information is.
April 12th, 2006 at 6:16 pm
I can only speak for myself but I want heights above sea level. I thought this would be easy to find but I was so wrong. My search has led me to this campaign.
April 12th, 2006 at 8:41 pm
Penelope – heights of what?
April 2nd, 2008 at 11:43 pm
I second, whole-heartedly, the list Nick has presented above.
We’ve paid for this data, so why shouldn’t we see it?