The last year at the UK Met Office the last year has been both exciting and challenging as a lot has happened over the last year. This talk will present some of the main highlights of the past year and present plans for the next. The role of technology in delivering the benefits of research is becoming increasingly important and much effort is now being spent in order for the Met Office to “pull through” the scientific benefits accrued through a large investment in research and resources. Over the last twelve months a lot of thought and planning has taken place in order to improve our IT infrastructure with the express aim of reducing the time required to deliver products and services to our customers by ensuring that access to high quality data is made easier, both internally and externally.

The retirement of the Horace workstation, although not complete is well underway and a considerable amount of work has been done in “service enabling” our new workstation; “Visual Weather” (VisWX) sourced from IBL, a specialist software company based in central Europe. The original scope of the workstation has been somewhat extended and VisWX will not only be used by our forecasters, but will be one of the main components of our new “Service Orientated Architecture” (SOA) where it will be used a general purpose server and this talk will describe how this has been achieved. A large programme of work has also just been agreed that will continue and accelerate the work in developing a SOA and this will be described along with the expected benefits it is expected to deliver.