Question to the Department for Science, Innovation & Technology:

To ask the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, what steps the Meteorological Office is taking to improve the accuracy of weather forecasts.

The Met Office is one of the world’s leading meteorological services and maintains a detailed ‘forecast accuracy roadmap’ demonstrating how it will deliver improvements over the next 5 years across timescales ranging from 0 hours to 7 days ahead. Improvements focus on Science and Operations and include activities such as exploiting enhancements in the Numerical Weather Prediction brought about by investment in new Supercomputing capability, improvements to the weather observations which feed its models, and advances in the way data is accessed by its operational experts. These improvements are scrutinised and governed by the Public Weather Service Customer Group.