A brighter How did the Met Office come about? outlook By Captain Chris Leech, Log Board member On 25th August 1859, the fast clipper, Royal Charter, left Melbourne, Australia, bound for the UK. On board were some 375 passengers, 112 crew, and vast fortunes in bullion – the proceeds of the Australian gold rushes. Two months later, on 25th October – having made a port call at Queenstown, Ireland – Royal Charter set sail on the final leg of the journey to Liverpool. What her crew could not know, without the availability of the synoptic charts and forecasts we would expect today, was that a huge Atlantic storm was bearing down on the British Isles. By that afternoon, as she rounded northwest Wales, she was being battered by 100mph easterly winds which, as the evening progressed, intensified to hurricane force 12 and backed to the north, driving her towards the Anglesey coast. Anchors were dropped to halt the drift, but snapped after two hours. The captain then ordered the masts and rigging to be cut away to reduce windage and give the steam engines a chance but, in the early hours of the 26th, she went aground on a sandbank in Porth Helaeth bay. Huge waves swept people from her decks, but rescue still seemed possible. However, a rising tide refloated the vessel, which sealed her fate as she was then dashed against nearby rocks and broke in two. Around 40 survivors struggled to shore. The rest, including all the women and children, were drowned or smashed against the rocks. The wreck of the Royal Charter gave its name to the storm The sinking of the Royal Charter in 1859 led to the foundation of the world-renowned Met Office that also claimed 133 other vessels and about 800 lives, and received great public and media attention. In its wake, a retired naval captain, Robert FitzRoy, who – five years earlier – had founded a small department to collate weather data, decided to produce meteorological charts and storm warnings, which he called a ‘weather forecast’. Thus the foundation of the Met Office was laid. Military importance Initially it was a civilian organisation under the Board of Trade, but the importance of weather forecasting for military operations became apparent during the First World War and, immediately after the conflict ended, it became part of the Air Ministry. This accounts for why so many data collection points are located at airfields. It became a civilian body again in 2011, and is now the executive agency and trading fund (government- speak for a self-financing unit that operates in a commercial manner) of the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. With its headquarters in Exeter, it employs 1,700 people at 60 locations throughout the world and, in 1997, its supercomputer was ranked third most powerful in the world. The Met Office is a CAA-designated provider of meteorological services – including TAFs and hazardous weather warnings at airports. It is also one of only two world area forecast centres – the other is in the US – providing global forecasts of upper winds/ temperatures, and SIGWX charts. It is also one of nine volcanic ash advisory centres – its remit covering eruptions originating in Iceland and the northeastern Atlantic. WEATHER