Operations-to-Research (O2R) at the Met Office – A Gateway for Operational Meteorologists to Inform Met Office Science and Help Improve Forecasting of Extreme and Impactful Weather

The growth and advances in Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP), post-processed output and new forecasting tools over the last 20 or 30 years has led to a greater need for dialogue between operations and research. This has led to the birth and subsequent development of more formal Operations-to-Research/Research-to-Operations collaboration within the broader meteorological community.

The Met Office is no exception and since the late 2010s/early 2020s a formal role has existed whereby a Principal Operational Meteorologist leads O2R on behalf of the operational community and, in more recent years, also leading a small, highly-motivated team of OpMets to support this work.

In this presentation, processes and methodologies (co-)led by O2R and by which the operational community at the Met Office feeds back to research areas are outlined. These processes are intended to promote two-way flow of dialogue and provide operational perspectives, use cases and customer benefits of NWP and post-processed output, in particular, and help inform the future direction and development of these outputs.

Among the processes highlighted are the value of a log – the Daily Forecast Assessment (DFA) – completed by operational meteorologists when on-duty to capture their perceptions of model performance. Feedback submitted to the DFA informs known model characteristics and helps prioritise work to improve Met Office NWP.

Meanwhile, another particular focus of this presentation concerns the role of testbeds and intensive evaluations, where scientists, developers, operational meteorologists and other users work together collaboratively over a period of few weeks on a series of forecasting and subjective verification exercises. This is a proven concept for accelerating the development of new tools and forecasting techniques. Here, an intensive evaluation run during autumn 2025 investigating aspects of the Met Office’s latest model upgrade, which went live in January 2026, is drawn upon to illustrate how operational meteorologists assessed new science to help improve the forecasting of extreme and impactful weather and, by extension, consider the impact of this new science on the Met Office’s public weather warning service, the National Severe Weather Warnings Service (NSWWS).