FORECAST BRITAIN
The Met Office's own models, rendered the way they deserve — every three hours, at 2 km.
Britain and Ireland, and everything under them
LOADING…Click a nation for its forecasts and warnings, or a centre for the models framed on it. Drawn in transverse Mercator — the Ordnance Survey's own convention — with the relief and the North Sea's real bathymetry rendered from the elevation itself, the way an atlas plate is.
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FREE · NO ACCOUNT · MET OFFICE DATAModel Explorer
The 2 km mesoscale model over Britain, Ireland and the near continent — temperature, radar-style rain, wind, gusts, fog, CAPE and lightning, on a free map with a value under every pixel.
Global 10 km
The model behind the model: the Met Office global run to seven days, drawn on its full worldwide grid — zoom out and it keeps going. Includes 850 hPa temperature, 500 hPa heights and the jet.
Ocean Waves
The Met Office's global wave model — WAVEWATCH III, driven by the Global 10 km run — in metres of significant wave height, broken on the Shipping Forecast's own sea states, with the swell and the wind sea separated and their directions drawn over the top.
Legacy Chart Viewer
The classic instrument: fixed framings, a keyboard, the whole run decoded up front for instant loops. The camera moves only when a place button is pressed, so a change on screen is a change in the weather.
Polar Explorer
The caps Web Mercator cannot show, on a polar stereographic projection oriented so Britain faces the reader — from the same global run, in the same colours.
Why this site exists
The UKV, taken seriously
The Met Office's 2 km model is one of the best mesoscale forecasts in the world and almost nobody outside the Met Office renders it. Here it is the flagship: every 3-hourly run, hourly frames, drawn at native detail from the open-data feed.
Absolute colour scales
Every ramp is pinned to real values — 0 °C is always the same colour, a 70 mph gust always announces itself — so a loop shows the weather changing, never the palette re-fitting itself. And every pixel can be read back: hover anywhere for the number.
Two models, one instrument
Flip UKV against the Global at the same valid instant and any difference on screen is a real disagreement between the models. Same colours, same framing, same probe — pointed at two forecasts.
Part of a network
Forecast Britain is the British member of a family of model sites: Forecast Euro reads ECMWF, Forecast Canada reads the MSC suite, and weather.city covers places rather than models. A companion site for Ireland is on the way.