Case Study: Met Office achieves rapid, scalable, and cost-effective weather-data delivery with Amazon Web Services

Met Office - Customer Case Study

The Met Office, the UK’s national weather service based in Exeter, operates two on‑premise supercomputers and processes more than 300 million observations daily to run 20 quadrillion calculations and generate millions of forecasts. Faced with an exabyte archive, rising third‑party demand (notably from aviation), and spikes in public traffic during events like Storm Katie (a 200% visitor surge), the organization needed a secure, scalable way to deliver consumable weather data to apps and partners on demand.

The Met Office moved its public data delivery to AWS—using services such as EC2, Lambda, S3, ElastiCache and API Gateway and working with partner Cloudreach—to power the Met Office Weather App and APIs. Since launch, the app has attracted over 500,000 users; infrastructure provisioning has gone from months to minutes, data delivery from 10 minutes to 10 seconds, storage now scales ~1,000% versus prior limits, and initial on‑premises costs were cut by more than half. The cloud also improved security monitoring, accelerated release cadence (30x more frequent), and enabled fast, low‑cost experimentation.

Met Office

James Tomkins

Head of Enterprise IT Architecture