Create and publish weather and climate stories
A Met Office service that turns live forecasts and a century of climate records into accurate, ready-to-check weather and climate stories.
What this service does
This Met Office service helps journalists cover the weather accurately, even without a meteorology background and under a tight deadline. It brings the Met Office's official forecasts, warnings and historical climate records into one place, and uses them to draft, explain and fact-check stories — always grounded in the underlying data, with sources you can trace.
It is not a replacement for editorial or expert judgement. Every output points back to the Met Office data behind it, so your newsroom stays in control of what gets published.
What you can do
Get the weather picture
A single dashboard of the current forecast, warnings and radar for your patch.
Automated briefings
A plain-English self-briefing on what today's weather means for your audience.
Create a story
Draft a live-blog intro, broadcast script or article — grounded in official data.
Query the archive
Put today in context: “How unusual is this rainfall over the last 100 years?”
Built on official Met Office data
The service draws only on the Met Office's own sources rather than third-party feeds, so the weather it reports on is the weather of record.
Sources this service uses
- Met Office Data Hub APIs
Live forecasts, observations and severe-weather warnings. - Climate & historical records
Decades of data to put today's conditions in context. - Official warning framework
Yellow, amber and red warnings, as issued by the Met Office.
Weather terms, in plain English
A quick reference for the terms behind the forecast — written so anyone in the newsroom can use them accurately, and so a story never misreports what the data means.
Weather warnings
Yellow, amber and red flag how likely severe weather is and how big the impact could be — red is the most serious.
Probability of precipitation
The chance of rain (or snow) falling in a given hour or area — "40%" means 4 times in 10 under these conditions, not "40% of the time".
Feels-like temperature
What the air actually feels like on your skin once wind and humidity are taken into account, which can differ from the measured figure.
Gust vs mean wind
Mean wind is the sustained speed; a gust is a brief peak. Damage and disruption usually track the gusts.
Return period
Roughly how often an event of a given size is expected — a "1-in-100-year" rainfall has about a 1% chance in any single year.
Anomaly
How far conditions sit above or below the long-term average — the basis for saying a month was "warmer than usual".
Help when you need it
Guidance & how-tos
Step-by-step help on briefings, story creation and reading the data — searchable and written in plain English.
Talk to a person
Prefer to talk it through? Reach the Met Office team for help with the service or a meteorology question.
Give feedback
This is an alpha prototype. Tell us what works and what doesn't — it shapes what we build next.