Met Office use of social media as source of weather impact information supporting issue of National Severe Weather Warnings

The Met Office is responsible for the issue of warnings for the United Kingdom through the National Severe Weather Warnings Service (NSWWS) and has been exploring innovative ways of gathering weather information from the public through social media as well as gaining greater warning reach. An important part of this is the Met Office Weather Observations Website that incorporates information from social media to give a real time map of crowd sourced observations. The official Met Office Facebook, Twitter and YouTube accounts are also used to communicate with the public about upcoming and occurring weather events whilst the monitoring of twitter trends is extremely important as the focus of the NSWWS has changed in recent years to the impact of weather as opposed to simple occurrence.

This presentation will show some of the tools in use by the Met Office supporting operational meteorologists both in advising the public about disruptive weather events and in decision support/verification.