Model Explorer

Two models from the UK Met Office, both built on the Unified Model and both drawn here on the same colour scale so they can be read against one another. The UKV resolves 2 km detail over Britain, Ireland and the near continent with a fresh run every three hours, out to 54 hours — close enough to watch a sea-breeze front or a snow shower off the North Sea. The Global is the 10 km run behind it, shown to seven days and drawn on its full global grid — zoom out and it keeps going.

Switching model holds the valid time, not the forecast hour. The UKV updates every three hours where the Global runs four times a day, so +12 h on one is rarely +12 h on the other — matching the instant instead means any difference you see between the tabs is a real disagreement between the models rather than an artefact of comparing two different moments.

Fields are drawn straight from the Met Office's published output with no smoothing and no rescaling — colour ramps are pinned to absolute values, so a loop shows real intensity changes rather than a palette re-fitting itself each frame. Temperatures are Celsius and winds miles per hour, the way the national forecast reads them. For warnings, the Met Office is always the authority.