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1854: The Met Office is founded to provide information on the weather and marine currents to the marine community. This small department of the Board of Trade is headed by Vice-Admiral Robert FitzRoy. Fitzroy established a network of coastal weather stations, and pioneered daily weather reports in newspapers, coining the phrase "weather forecast" in the process.

1861: The first international meteorological congress in Vienna founded an International Meteorological Organization to further essential international co-operation. This eventually transformed into the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), a specialised agency of the United Nations.

1909: Transatlantic shipping starts to use wireless telegraphy to transmit weather messages ashore.

1912: Rapid developments in meteorology lead to the establishment of the first outstation at South Farnborough to give advice to pilots.
Photo: Lewis Fry Richardson

1914: Lewis Fry Richardson conceives forecasting can be carried out using numerical techniques. He imagines 64,000 people carrying out calculations in a vast hall and comments: "Perhaps some day in the dim future it will be possible to advance the computations faster than the weather advances. But that is a dream". By 1965 numerical forecasts produced operationally as routine.

1922: Forecasts are first broadcast by BBC radio.

1939: Radiosondes are launched to gather observations from the upper air — a collection of balloon-borne sensors transmit data on pressure, temperature and humidity to receiving sites on land.

1944: The D-Day landings are planned but are postponed due to bad weather. Group Captain Stagg, the RAF's chief meteorologist (and a Met Office employee) informs General Eisenhower on 5 June that a 36-hour 'weather window' is imminent. President Truman later said: "The day selected for the continental assault was probably the only day during the month of June on which the operations could have been launched".

1953: A severe depression and storm surge in the North Sea causes catastrophic flooding in south-east England. This leads to planning and eventual construction of the Thames Barrier and the development of the Met Office's Storm Tide Forecasting Service.
Photo: George Cowling

1954: The first live BBC Television forecast, lasting five minutes, was made by Met Office forecaster George Cowling.

Photo: London Weather Centre opens

1959: London Weather Centre opens.

1962: Her Majesty the Queen performs the official opening ceremony of the new Headquarters at Bracknell. The Met Office takes delivery of its first electronic computer so that numerical forecast techniques can be applied operationally.

1964: The first operational cloud pictures from satellites are available.

1977: European weather satellite, Meteosat 1 is launched. This collaborative project will in time provide a major input to the numerical models.

1981: The Met Office's first supercomputer — the Cyber 205 — is installed to run the new 15-level atmospheric model. The airborne spread of foot-and-mouth disease to livestock on the south coast of England is predicted.

1982: The first global operational forecasting model is introduced to assist in operations for the Falklands War.

1984: World Area Forecasting Centre status for aviation is accredited to the Met Office; one of only two world centres for civil aviation.

1987: A severe storm inflicts major damage to large areas of southern and south-east England. It leads to a review of forecasting methods and the development of the National Severe Weather Warning Service.

1990: The Met Office becomes an Executive Agency of the Ministry of Defence. The Met Office Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research is opened.

1991: A Cray Y-MP supercomputer is installed and, for the first time, a single numerical model (merging ocean and atmosphere) is used for climate and weather prediction.

1996: A network of European national meteorological services (EUMETNET) is established with the help of the Met Office. The Met Office becomes a Trading Fund.

1998: Volcanic activity in Iceland releases vast quantities of ash into the atmosphere. The Met Office's dispersion model successfully predicts how it will behave and so averts aircraft disasters.

2002: The Met Office provides guidance and support to senior planners and operational staff for Operation Veritas in Afghanistan. The Mobile Meteorological Unit is deployed to theatre.
Photo: Exeter HQ

2004: The Met Office's new headquarters in Exeter are officially opened and fully operational. The move from Bracknell is probably the largest move of an operational computer complex in Europe, and is carried out on time and within planned costs.

2005: Stabilisation 2005 Conference held at the Met Office in Exeter. The world's leading climate scientists gathered under one roof to discuss vital climate-change issues.

Met Office: http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/