Paper detail

What is next for National Meteorological Services?

Weather prediction is one of the greatest scientific and technical successes of the last century. Today, National Meteorological Services routinely produce forecasts that have a major positive impact across society and many economic sectors. This success has been intrinsically linked to improvements in supercomputing which has increased various orders of magnitude following Moores Law, enabling underpinning increases in model complexity and resolution. However, there are good reasons to believe that we may have reached the end of this particular road. The combination of technological discontinuities and contextual changes mean that NMS are facing the highest level of uncertainty and change in many decades. This brings new organisational challenges, altering existing power and social structures within NMS. Analysis from other industries that have faced similar transformations in the past show that the period of change we are entering could be as long as thirty years and that there is a substantial risk that the foundations of the weather industry could be altered significantly. Therefore, NMS need to use their resources not only to make best use of the diminishing improvements available within the current technology trajectory but to simultaneously innovate in new technologies to ensure they can generate value in the future. This paper analyses the strategic options available to National Meteorological Services.