Met Office
United Kingdom's national weather service
The Met Office, previously known as the Meteorological Office until November 2000, is the United Kingdom's national weather and climate service. It is an executive agency and trading fund of the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology and is led by CEO Penny Endersby, who took on the role as Chief Executive in December 2018 and is the first woman to do so. The Met Office makes meteorological predictions across all timescales from weather forecasts to climate change.
Although an executive agency of the UK Government, the Met Office supports the Scottish Government, Welsh Government and Northern Ireland Executive in their functions and preparations ahead of intense weather and planning for extreme weather alerts. Met Office policies can be used by each government to inform their planning and decision making processes. The Met Office has an office located in the Scottish capital, Edinburgh, and a forecasting centre in Aberdeen in the north-east of Scotland, which are some of the services used to help the Scottish Government with objectives such as climate change.
History
The Met Office was established on 1 August 1854 as a small department within the Board of Trade under Vice Admiral Robert FitzRoy as a service to mariners. The loss of the passenger vessel, the Royal Charter, and 459 lives off the coast of Anglesey in a violent storm in October 1859 led to the first gale warning service. FitzRoy established a network of 15 coastal stations from which visual gale warnings could be provided for ships at sea.
The new electric telegraph enabled rapid dissemination of warnings and also led to the development of an observational network which could then be used to provide synoptic analysis.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Met Office” as united Kingdom's national weather service. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as united Kingdom's national weather service. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 29, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1851405. VIAF identifies the subject as 129070312. The Library of Congress control number is n80075906. Authority coordinates are 50.727, -3.475. 5 of 5 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2000, 2018, 1854 and 1859.
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This entry incorporates text from “Met Office” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.