The Met Office's own models, taken seriously. The UKV is one of the best mesoscale forecast models in the world — 2 km cells over Britain, Ireland and the near continent, refreshed every three hours — and almost nobody outside the Met Office renders it. This site makes it the flagship, with the Global 10 km run behind it for the week ahead and the upstream Atlantic, and the Met Office's global wave model — the sea that same global run is raising — alongside them.

Navigate by place, not by zoom. Nations, cities, the whole of Britain and Ireland, Europe, the North Atlantic, the world — each is a framing you press a button for, and the finest model that covers the place answers. Flipping between models holds the valid time, so what changes on screen is the forecast, not the camera.

The models come from the Met Office's open-data feed on AWS — the two atmospheric ones from met-office-atmospheric-model-data, one NetCDF per variable per lead time, and the wave model from met-office-global-wave-model-data, which packs a day of hourly steps into each file. The ingest runs on the European side of the Atlantic, next to the data; only finished imagery crosses the ocean. Fields are drawn with no smoothing and no rescaling; colour ramps are pinned to absolute values; every frame is a reversible encoding, which is what lets the pointer read a number back out of any pixel.

Temperatures are Celsius and winds miles per hour — the national forecast's own mix — and seas are in metres, broken on the Douglas scale the Shipping Forecast states them by: slight, moderate, rough, very rough, high. Runs are kept for 24 hours; isobars are drawn from the full-precision field, never from the picture.

Not an official Met Office service, and not a source of weather warnings — for those, the Met Office is always the authority. Contains Met Office data licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Rendering and commentary are this site's own.