Case Study: The Met Office achieves instant scalability for global weather reporting with PA Consulting and Google App Engine

U.K.’s National Weather Service tracks weather in the cloud with Google App Engine

The Met Office, the United Kingdom’s national weather forecasting service, wanted a central online platform for weather enthusiasts and schools to submit and share observations while handling traffic spikes without adding infrastructure. To meet this challenge, The Met Office worked with PA Consulting and evaluated cloud options, ultimately looking for a scalable, easy-to-manage service built with familiar Java tools.

PA Consulting helped build and launch the site on Google App Engine in just five months, using Google Maps, Google APIs, and a web-based dashboard for monitoring. The result was a cloud service that scales automatically, requires minimal maintenance, and has collected more than 25 million weather observations from users in 136 countries, giving The Met Office confidence that it can continue to grow without added hardware.

The Met Office

Adrian Shand

IT Project Manager