MET OFFICE MOVES 400TB DAILY DATA OUTPUT TO CLOUD
Weather service generates £ 180m($ 245m) annual value through Snowflake marketplace partnership after ditching FTP systems
The Met Office produces over 400 terabytes of weather data daily and has moved this output to Snowflake’ s cloud platform after abandoning its own APIs and FTP file transfer systems.
Richard Lawrence, Met Office Principal Fellow for Technology, says the organisation shifted strategy when“ people weren’ t coming to us to get data anymore. They were essentially either on platforms already where they already have data and they would search for weather.”
The Met Office operates as a government trading fund and must return profits while delivering socioeconomic value. Studies with London Economics show the organisation generates a 19-to-1 return on investment. Richard says enabling wider access to the Met Office’ s four main datasets“ would generate about £ 180 million( US $ 245m) of economic value per year.”
The partnership addresses a technical mismatch.“ We’ re not specialists in that space, so we’ re just not able to innovate at the same pace that the industry is,” Richard says. The Met Office found other companies“ were doing that better than we could.”
Snowflake’ s marketplace enables unexpected data combinations that the Met Office would not pursue independently.“ There’ s been examples that Snowflake have done and others have done of joining up our data with either other government data or commercially available data and just coming back with insights that we wouldn’ t have been the ones to find,” Richard says.
The weather service now uses AI models alongside physics-based forecasting and has developed automated telephone services for communities that avoid digital platforms.“ Being able to have a conversation with a meteorologist about what the data’ s showing – everybody loves to talk about the weather, it’ s a natural interface to do that,” Richard says.