Met Office forecasts blue skies for green IT

It seems fitting that after the Met Office helped open the eyes of the world to global warming it is at the forefront of efforts to prevent it.

Since moving to its headquarters in Exeter the weather forecaster has embraced the green ethos, replacing energy guzzling mod-cons with natural alternatives.

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The HQ minimises its CO2 emissions, air-con is replaced by cavernous pipes and thermally absorbent concrete beams that suck in the cool night air and release it during the day, while toilets are flushed with pond water filtered through reed beds.

But the biggest shift has been in computing, where water drawn from a local borehole will provide the constant cooling for its 600 servers and the NEC SX-6 supercomputers, with equivalent power of 8,000 PCs, that forecasts weather and maps climate change.

These computational workhorses and their predecessors at the Met Office Hadley Centre crunched through global data to produce evidence for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports, whose predictions of a 0.2C temperature rise per decade gradually won over hard-line climate sceptics, including the US government.

Green innovations abound in the IT department, the lifetime of systems has been extended from about three to eight years, employees only have one computer each and old machines are passed on to its international network of volunteer data gatherers.

Meanwhile staff share three printers between about 100 people, are encouraged to turn off the HQ's 1,900 PCs out-of-hours and have three video-conferencing rooms to link them to 60 branch offices over ISDN.

Dr Steve Foreman, head of IT services at the Met Office, who shared in the Nobel prize for his work on the IPCC reports, said: "The Met Office is one of the leaders in climate change.

"We had a very real opportunity when we moved from Bracknell to Exeter.

"We realised that the majority of the consumption comes from the HQ side and we had a purpose-built building. It was designed with environmental issues, recycling and conservation in mind."

The processors within the NEC supercomputer work in parallel, allowing it to simultaneously link and process climate data from 4km parcels of the UK, giving it the ability to forecast weather at a county level.

Its global climate change model relies on the same software and teams, splitting the world into 40sq km chunks and analysing the data within each cell to reveal patterns and make predictions.

Foreman said: "It is one of the most accurate forecast models" and added its climate models are some of the most detailed available.

Other countries using the Met Office's model for forecasting include India and Australia.