Met Office forecasts SOA pay-off

Whether it is hail, thunder, rain or fine weather, tracking it and reporting on it are the meat and drink of staff at the Met Office. Now they are trialling service-oriented architectures to see what they can do to help.

So far, the signs are good, following successful initial trials on the potential of service-oriented architectures (SOA) with their primary helper, Borland, in attendance. Now, under the guidance of deputy technology director, David Underwood, they have moved to the next stage and are running a number of detailed SOA trials that should produce concrete results.

We spoke to Underwood about the role of the Met Office, the need for SOA applications to show real returns, and what this could mean for the Met Office.

Q: How is the Met Office set up? For example, who pays for it?
A: We are a Ministry of Defence [MoD] trading fund. We are wholly owned by the MoD on behalf of the government. But, because we are a trading fund, which we have been since 1996, we are required to recover all of our costs via trading.

What is the relationship with the MoD?
We have two relationships with the MoD: one as owner and one as a customer. We have many customer relationships across government, with people like Defra [Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs], the FCO [Foreign and Commonwealth Office] — all sorts of different agencies of government — in the same way that we have contracts with many commercial organisations, such as the CAA [Civil Aviation Authority].

We are targeted on making profits. We have to pay a dividend back to our owner.

We have been operating that way since 1996 and very successfully. The board also has representatives from stakeholders who have an interest, such as the CAA, who continue to make sure that the Met Office continues to serve government needs.

How about the public?
We also have a representative on the board of the Public Weather Service [PWS], which is the stuff you see through the BBC or ITV. That underpins the basic daily forecast. If you call in and ask: "What is the weather going to be like in my area?", that is produced by the PWS.

That is about delivering to the individual — you or I. It's a group independent of us and sponsored and funded by us, but they act independently and task us on behalf of the public. They do various forums and so on to make sure they have an up-to-date understanding of how people want to receive this information.

For example, in recent months, you may have noticed far more use of probabilistic displays, like a 60 percent or 80 percent chance of flooding or disruption. Now, these have been used by some of our users for decades but very much [by] those who manage on a risk basis. The traditional old forecast would have been deterministic. Now you see these probability curves.

Climate and climate change are seen by industry, government and the public as being more important now. Can you talk a little about the work that goes into creating the models for this?
The models are highly mathematical, coupled with a knowledge of the physics and chemistry that lie behind them. They tend to do a regular update of between six and 18 months, depending on the amount of changes being introduced. So we plan two or three years in advance as we eat up the technology — the capacity of the supercomputer to handle the calculations.

For example, we are about to go from 50 layers in the atmospheric model to 70. That places huge computational demands on the number required for creating an initial state because, as you increase the number of grid points, you will need to create our initial state of the atmosphere, which is the very start of the simulation.

In our climate model, it could be looking at 50 or 70 years ahead, as opposed to a day so. They are quite different cycles of development.

On the climate models, we are the customer for it because we are defining how the model will evolve. But, in different areas, the customer may be the public or defence sectors or an aviation customer or...

...a department of government or the insurance business. It might be very generic in nature. A platform for a web-delivery system is something we are moving towards in the introduction of SOA and that is something that our partner, Borland, is involved with.

How did you go about implementing SOA?
We ran a pilot last year, simply to establish the pros and cons. It was extremely successful and we used it to talk to an awful lot of our customer groups, telling them of some of the things we could do if we were to operationally implement SOA.

For two or three of the customer groupings, such as defence and the roads and highway agencies, there was strong interest in the sort of flexibility that SOA could offer, certainly in terms of the pace and speed with which we could create new styles of delivery.

We are going ahead with a project that started two months ago and will wind up around October or November this year, providing two demonstrators, one for operational trial next winter in the roads environment and one to be trialled in the defence environment.

We had the idea that we will be looking at implementing operational services in the summer of next year.

What SOA could mean for the Met Office is huge. The amounts of data are huge. When we talk about terabits, that is simply the data that, at the end of the day, we retain, as opposed to the many terabits of data, which could be satellite imagery, that might only keep for 10 or 12 hours.

The project can really have quite a profound implication for the amount of information we handle.

And we want to make information accessible but, if people want to extract large amounts of data, that can have profound implications on our web architectures and that sort of thing.

Is SOA the sort of architecture that gives you true flexibility?
Yes. Ultimately it takes you away from bespoke platforms completely. All you need is a suitably web-enabled terminal, with the addresses and connections to the sources of information you wish to access. So, once it has been web-enabled and you have permission to use it, then you can actually create products — what we would describe as being able to very rapidly prototype, format and style the delivery that helps the customer answer the question they have got.

What sort of products?
Seldom are they actually interested in the volume of rain or the temperature. It is usually the consequence of that: "How much energy will I sell? How much gas might I have to pump? How much water might I have to move?"

If you are the NHS, it might be: "How many admissions might I have to take?" They are not interested in the basic information. It is that we have worked in combining our information with their information in a form that adds new intelligence.

So, for the NHS, we may prepare information on the number of chronic pulmonary conditions they might have to admit. They can take their information on the number of people who have the conditions and correlate that with the weather conditions.

Better than that, by forecasting four or five days ahead and feeding that information to the primary care division, they are able to intervene and stop it becoming an admission.

So you work very closely with the NHS?
We are developing that at the moment.

How does SOA help?
It makes it all the easier to tailor the delivery of our information to meld with theirs, very simply. And this can come from comparing things which, by themselves, are not easy to see, like marine environment data with hospital admissions. Odds are that there is nothing particularly useful to be gained, but it is an example of two data sets that, if you had wanted to overlay them in the past, it would have involved two or three man months of work. Now we can do it in two or three minutes.

For defence, they would want to take our information and mine it with defence intelligence information into their operations.