From the Airfield to the High Street: The Met Office’s Role in the Emergence of Commercial Weather Services ALEXANDER HALL* Coventry University, Coventry, United Kingdom (Manuscript received 15 May 2014, in final form 13 February 2015) ABSTRACT This paper explores the role of the United Kingdom’s National Meteorological Service, the Met Office (MO), in the early development (1945–65) of applied, and subsequently commercial, weather and climatological services in the United Kingdom. Through examination of archival records it shows how theoretical and tech- nological developments led to the postwar expansion of services for the general public and new user groups, resulting in funding pressure on the organization and the proactive seeking of nongovernment funding sources. The paper then explores the influence of these early developments on the subsequent large-scale expansion of applied and commercial services at the MO, which were to be enshrined in the organization’s mandate when it became an executive agency under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s efficiency review in 1990. It is shown that the history of the Met Office’s role in applied weather services is important for un- derstanding the organization’s position today as a civil agency that acts commercially, the broader process of ‘‘agentification’’ of the scientific civil service, and the United Kingdom’s prominence internationally in the private weather services market. By considering developments in the context of other National Meteoro- logical Services and the international forum provided by the World Meteorological Organization, the de- velopment of weather services at the Met Office is shown to have been influenced by international best practice while remaining distinct in its approach to delivering a broad range of both public and commercial services. 1. Introduction In the financial year 2013–14 the United Kingdom’s National Meteorological Service (NMS), the Met Office (MO), 1 made an operating profit of GBP £11.2 million and paid GBP £9.5 million in dividends to its parent govern- ment department, the Department for Business, In- novation and Skills (Met Office 2014, 20–22). These figures are the latest in a long series of successful profits posted by the organization and were announced against a backdrop of continued criticism of public agencies charging for public sector information that has been funded by the taxpayer. 2 In contrast, in the United States information produced by publicly funded government agencies is freely available. This American open-access approach is in- creasingly beginning to challenge the traditional European model of cost recovery, which treats information as a commodity to gain revenues (Weiss 2002). With other European NMSs, such as the Norwegian Meteorologisk Institutt, now providing access to all of their data for free, and campaigns such as the Guardian’s Free Our Data gaining traction, the U.K. government has begun to issue more data under Open Government Licenses. 3 Despite government departments and agencies, including the En- vironment Agency, Ordnance Survey, and the MO, under * Current affiliation: Newman University, Birmingham, United Kingdom. Corresponding author address: Dr. Alexander Hall, Newman University, Genners Lane, Birmingham, B32 3NT, United Kingdom. E-mail: alexanderfrederickhall@gmail.com 1 Although throughout its history the organization has collo- quially been referred to as the Met Office, until 1996 its official name was the Meteorological Office. The abbreviation MO is used throughout. 2 For more on the debate surrounding charges for meteorological data in Europe see PRIMET 2011. 3 The Open Government License was introduced in 2010 and is based upon and designed to operate alongside Creative Commons licenses. JULY 2015 HALL 211 DOI: 10.1175/WCAS-D-14-00021.1 Ó 2015 American Meteorological Society