1. Smart Cities
Connecting the Citizen for protection, prosperity and wellbeing
Rich Carne
@RichCarne
richcarne.wordpress.com
December 2014

2. Purpose
Why do we exist?
‘Working at the forefront of weather and climate science for protection, prosperity and wellbeing’
Enabling protection of lives, infrastructure and the natural world
Increasing prosperity, enabling economic growth
Improving wellbeing now, and in the future
Our purpose is to work at the forefront of weather & climate science to provide protection, prosperity and enhance wellbeing. CLICK
In a bit more detail, our job is to protect lives and property
To increase prosperity by allowing the UK to make good decisions at all levels where weather and climate are a factor. This often takes the form of risk mitigation and the offset risk to life or cost. Whilst we cannot change the weather, small improvements in accuracy or additional time gained by earlier warning makes a huge difference in action that can be taken to mitigate significant weather events. CLICK
Some of the decisions are big ones taken at a high level such as in contingency planning or disaster recovery but to all of us, at some time weather is important. Thankfully in the UK we do not have the severity of impact that others in the world experience but at a macro level, lots of good small decisions taken by many people also have a large socio-economic impact. This may be the cost saved by a large area at risk of flood taking personal action or at it’s most trivial, making sure that you don’t take the pushbike and find yourself cycling home into a howling gale

3. Global observing system
In brief
The starting point for our forecasts are observations of the weather.
There are many information sources measuring the different aspects of the weather.
Over 100 Million observations a day processed and stored
This involves a network of over 190 countries who work within the standards laid out by a United Nations structure called the World Meteorology Organisation which allows the sharing of 6,000,000 messages a day, equivalent to 70 messages a second, every day from a huge variety of sea, land, air and space based platforms. This activity has been taking place for over 100 years in some shape or form and keeps working across geographical and changing political borders

4. 2014 operational forecast systems
In brief
We run high resolution forecasts for the UK (1.5km).
Lower resolution forecasts are used regionally.
In full
There are different levels of model resolution over the globe – so now weather and climate forecasts are much more detailed than in the past.
Over the years, these improvements in forecast model resolution have improved the accuracy of our weather forecasts.
Numerical weather prediction is the process of solving a set of mathematical equations to obtain an objective forecast of the future state of Earth’s atmosphere.
The equations describe changes in many variables (e.g. temperature, wind speed, humidity and pressure) and together define the state of the atmosphere.

5. Met Office in Numbers Everyday.....
100 million (around 300 Gigabytes) observations
Operational Models produce 4 Terabytes of products
Climate Research produce 52 Terabytes of data
In terms of Big Data we have the Volume Velocity and Verbosity!
Everyday.....
100 million (around 300 Gigabytes) observations
Operational Models produce 4 Terabytes of products
Climate Research produce 52 Terabytes of data 5

6. What we do Knowledge, Information & Decision Wisdom Knowledge Data
The Met Office is a world leading Scientific organisation in the area of weather and climate research. Back in the Shire at Exeter we have some of the worlds best scientists in their chosen field. Weather & Climate science are both relatively young and there are always new ideas and postulations about the workings of the weather and climate systems.
Through the Scientific process, hypothesise are tested and establish a body of accepted knowledge
This knowledge is then turned into computer code inside something that we call the Unified Model. This is the suite of weather and climate models that the Met Office operates unique in that they cover all geospatial dimensions in what we call a seamless prediction system.
As some of the more mathematically-minded of you will know and all of us know by bitter experience, the weather is a classical chaotic system that is driven by the laws of physics, hot air rises, pressure goes from high to low and that kind of thing. In order to begin to predict a chaotic system, you first have to capture it’s start state. This involves a network of over 190 countries who work within the standards laid out by a United Nations structure called the World Meteorology Organisation which allows the sharing of 6,000,000 messages a day, equivalent to 70 messages a second, every day from a huge variety of sea, land, air and space based platforms. This activity has been taking place for over 100 years in some shape or form and keeps working across geographical and changing political borders. In terms of Open, I would say that it is open(ish). Certainly the Met Office UK observations are however that represents less than 4% of the observations that we need and the situation to too complex for a short talk but we do have a programme of work with the National Archive and the ODI to look at this long term.
So that ‘start state’ is fed into the body of knowledge that is captured in the form of millions of lines of code in the unified model. We initialise the model with the observations and then step through time, applying the laws of physics so that we can predict the future state of the atmosphere. In this talk I cannot do this justice however the process results in a massive set of data that is the low level model outputs.
Just to provide a sense of scale, the High Resolution meso-scale model that runs over the UK produces some 380 Gb of data for every run, and we run it 4 times per day. That is just one of the 3 current production weather models and alongside that there are huge climate scale models running and research runs taking place all the time. That is why I have no hair!
So far of course, we have not done much to save life, property, enhance well-being or generate economic growth.....but at least the scientists are happy! CLICK
To realise the benefits we reverse the process and produce more useful and application specific data sets. The Met Office produce over 4 million discreet forecast every day and most have a data set associated with them. CLICK
Much of this data in then converted into useful information such as visualisations, graphs and plots CLICK
These create knowledge for our users CLICK
Upon which they can make informed decisions CLICK

7. What we do Wisdom Knowledge Data Information Decision Wisdom Knowledge
Where weather is important, we need to create a whole production chain that is optimised for the particular end user need. As well as variations in time and space, the weather needs for the aviation industry are very different than the needs of the renewable industry.
We see more and more examples of systems that need the data so that it can be combined with other data that is required for a good decision to be made. In the transport world, the same weather can have no impact or massive impact depending upon other information such as traffic levels, time of day, congestion and so on.
More and more, data is ‘the service’ and getting back to our purpose, the better that we can supply useful data that enables good decisions the better. For generic public data, that means making as much as widely used as possible and that means Open.
We turn these raw model spatial and temporal grids into meaningful products for the end user

8. Connecting the Citizen
Putting the right information at the fingertips of the citizen is vital ” “

9. What makes a Smart City Smart?“
Awareness of and interconnection with its Citizens to ensure their safety, prosperity and wellbeing ”

10. What we do Typhoon Haiyan 2013
in 2013 a devastating Typhoon struck Indonesia which according the UN killed over 6,000 people and affected 11 million, costing over 2.5 billion dollars.
The top sequence is the actual satellite observation of Haiyan the bottom one is our simulation of the event 2 day before! These statistics are even more disturbing in the knowledge that we had this information in advance but were unable to connect with those on the ground that needed advice.
***Need Sound byte from Robs progress brief on flooding advice***
Whilst we can’t change the weather we can increasingly better predict it. Many of the lives lost would not have been if better decisions had been made, better access to good information allows that to happen and Open Data will play an ever more important part.

11. Everyday objects Mobile IoT
At a recent Hackathon sponsored by the Met Office a group looking at flood warnings came up with a novel idea to build flood warnings into street lighting

12. Met Office Vision for the future of the connected car
Connected Vehicles
Met Office Vision for the future of the connected car
Two way data exchange
Vehicles interconnected
Automated actions

13. Weather Observation Website
Curators of environmental impact through crowd sourcing
Problem areas
Impact areas

14. Space Weather

15. Natural Hazards Partnership
Hazard Centre
Public
Met
EM Response
Hydro
Geo
Utilities

16. Challenges Time equally important to Spatial
Extensions to support N-Dimensional coverage
How do we solve the query problem - potential to break implementation
Data volumes – how do we take the problem to the data
Interpolation is not good for most Met data

17. Thank You
Rich Carne
@RichCarne
richcarne.wordpress.com
December 2014