Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, what plans he has to improve the resolution of weather warning systems.

The Met Office is committed to improving the accuracy of its weather forecasts on a continuous basis. Further improvements to the Met Office’s high resolution forecast model and systems are planned during the next twelve months, enabled by our investment in the new Met Office supercomputer. These improvements will provide additional local detail within rainfall forecasts for Cumbria and across the rest of the UK and also help to better quantify the uncertainty within rainfall predictions. This will enable the Met Office to provide earlier, more accurate and more detailed warning of severe weather and help the UK to be more resilient and better prepared for high impact events.