AI IN SUSTAINABILITY
AI is reshaping how we understand weather, climate and risk. For the Met Office, the UK’ s national meteorological service, that shift is as much about sustainability as it is about accuracy.
Kirstine Dale, the Met Office’ s Chief AI Officer and Principal Fellow for Data Science, has spent the past two years embedding AI across the organisation. She describes this as“ a journey that has been informative, exciting and challenging,” one that has overturned assumptions about public sector innovation.
“ I have seen the public sector be agile and innovative in a way I really didn’ t know was possible,” Kirstine says. That agility matters because weather and climate information underpins everything from aviation safety to energy planning and climate adaptation. The Met Office already runs one of the world’ s most advanced numerical weather prediction systems, powered by a £ 1.2bn( US $ 1.6bn) supercomputing partnership with Microsoft.
Modelling the atmosphere Traditional forecasts rely on a physicsbased model of the atmosphere, using the laws of motion, mass and energy to simulate how weather evolves. Every day, around 215 billion observations from satellites, land stations and ocean sensors flow into this system, where they are assimilated into high‐resolution simulations.
126 April 2026