It’s going to be sunny, or rainy

Ross Clark forecasts that in spite of its new £150 million headquarters the Met Office will still get the weather wrong

Guests invited to the official opening of the Met Office’s spanking new £150 million headquarters outside Exeter should take with them an umbrella. Or perhaps a sunhat. Or a thick coat. Or maybe just bung your entire wardrobe in the back of the car just in case. One thing is for sure: you won’t get a lot of guidance from the weather forecast.

Much has been written about the vast and accelerating quantities of taxpayers’ money being poured into health and education with little obvious benefit to the public. Less has been made of the expansionism in smaller government departments and agencies. The Met Office is a case in point. Besides its new headquarters and a new corporate logo consisting of green wavy lines on a blue background, the Met Office is about to take delivery of one of the world’s largest supercomputers. According to the organisation’s blurb, the computer will cover an area of 864 square metres and have the capacity to store one petabyte of data, which, it explains, is equivalent to one million gigabytes. Even if you don’t know what a gigabyte is, when you consider that Nasa put a man on the Moon using computer power inferior to that of the crummiest machine you can now pick up at PCWorld, you will get the idea that the Met Office’s machine is a jolly big computer indeed.

Notionally, the Met Office’s extravagance is of little concern to taxpayers. In 1996 it was made a ‘trading fund’ of the Ministry of Defence, meaning that it was expected to earn its keep by selling its services commercially.