Met Office

Mike Saunby

Met Office Hacking Journey

In 2012 a small number of Met Office staff who had experienced hackathons and similar events collaborated with NASA to bring their vision of a global weekend of hacking to the UK. The result was the first International Space Apps Challenge. When you’ve been part of an event across 17 countries and including over 2,000 participants, you don’t want the fun to end there.

Space Apps is now a regular annual event for a growing community. For many participants it’s often their first hackathon, and as with the Met Office in 2012, many organisations are hosting a hackathon for the first time. Events range in size from a dozen participants to well over a hundred. Total participation in 2014 was over 8,000 at 95 venues.

Memory of the Weather

The Met Office is working to provide online access to its archive of electronic data. This new archive complements the existing archive of paper records. Together they will form a seamless ‘Nation’s memory of the weather’. With the work being undertaken to prepare for the implementation of the digital archive, the Met Office saw an opportunity to bring to the V&A a small selection of materials to illustrate some of the stories their records can help to tell.

The Met Office, originally known as the Meteorological Office, was founded in 1854 under the leadership of Admiral Fitzroy. Its initial purpose was not to forecast but to seek to understand the world’s oceans in order to support British Trade and to improve the safeguarding of life and property at sea. After the sinking of the Royal Charter in 1859, which resulted in the loss of over 800 lives, Fitzroy fought for permission to introduce a Storm Warning Service. The warning service, launched in 1861, became the first national forecasting service in the world. Later that year Fitzroy established a weather forecast published in national newspapers, but at the time this was seen very much as a sideline because the public might be interested.

From these early origins the Office expanded rapidly and has adapted and changed with developments in science, communication and technology. The archive is a vast treasure trove of information and houses both the Met Office collection and the archives of the Royal Meteorological Society. Indeed if you were to put the used shelves end to end they would reach 4.5 times the height of Ben Nevis. The records we hold range from bottle messages used to track ocean currents through to the very first forecast, charts and daily weather summaries. We have ship logs, private weather diaries stretching back to the late 1600s, the original Beaufort Scale, daily registers and other types of observation data, expedition data including records from the ill fated Scott Polar expedition and a rare book collection, including our earliest item - a manuscript dating from c.1290. We are working to increase access to the archive collections by digitising some of the treasures from our document collections and we hope that this work will further complement the digital archive.

The Explorable Story Project

Martha Sedgwickk

The Explorable Story Project started as part of Space Apps 2013 as a way to take a group of primary school children to a hackathon, but is proof that the projects begun in hackathons don’t end at the deadline. Having no coding experience, we decided to take a beginner’s approach to hacking - using modelling clay. Originally, the story was going to be an interactive picture book, with simple animations, to introduce young children to science and exploration, but the lure of playing with modelling clay caused more people to join the team locally and translators joined from all over the world. The possibilities of collaboration expanded our thinking and by the end of the weekend, the first version of the story was available in 17 different languages. When we were discussing the variations of the story due to cultural differences, the team realised that the project had potential to do a whole lot more.

We hope to use STEM as a way to connect young children around the world by sharing the work they produce in response to learning about an area of science and exploration. The project is now building up a free database of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) exploration pages, which give explanations of people, places and activities in child-friendly language that is also translated into as many languages as possible to make it accessible to as many children as we can.

So far the project has taken us, with the support of the Met Office, to hack at the V&A Digital Futures exhibition and Mozfest 2013. We have also attended the UNAWE workshop 2013, ‘Astronomy to Inspire’ and ‘Educate Young Children’ where we worked with a group of German kindergarteners to create clay models and stories, and astronomy outreach specialists to gain better understanding of ways to help young children learn about space.

An extract of the story in Farsi, written by Narges Rasouli, Iran.

‘Hún ferðaðist eins langt og hún gat á landi or fór y r frosin sjó til að rannsaka meira, enn samt án arangurs.’

An extract of the Icelandic version of the story, written by Taggart Smith, Scotland.

‘Elle regarda sous les eaux, où elle trouva leurs cousins. Mais cela n’était pas suf sant, elle savait déjà que les narvals existaient!’

An extract of the French version of the story, written by Nathalü Vladis, Greece.

‘Once there was a stubborn little girl, whose favourite animal was the unicorn. She knew they existed because she’d seen a unicorn horn hanging on a museum wall when she was three (as we all know, three year olds are never mistaken!)’

The beginning of the first version of the story, written collaboratively by Martha Sedgwick and pupils Sophia, Tom and Oliver, UK.

Genevieve and Her Dancers

[arra]stre is a digital, data-driven dance performance that derives its movements and concepts from computer science theory. The performance will break down certain theories and concepts through the movement of ballet. [arra]stre will include data visualisation, images in uenced and triggered by data from the student dancers, wearable technology and the choreography itself. This work is a collaboration between readysaltedcode CIC, industry experts and Battle Abbey School Students.

This project has been funded by Arts Council England, grants for the arts and Google’s RISE award for Computer Science Education.

The project aims to increase understanding and reduce people’s fear of the subject of computer science. Speci cally, it attempts to increase the frequency people engage with technology, and deepen their understanding. The choreography reinterprets computer science theory from the new Computing Program of Study in England into dance form. The visualisations have been developed using web technologies such as JavaScript and D3 library, along with the use of wearable technology. Data collection from the dancers will use a variety of devices from the Kinect to wearable Arduinos.

The choreography was created by Dr Paul Golz, Creative Director of Ephemeris. Paul lectures in both Computer Science and Dance at the University of Worcester. Prior to this Paul was a physicist at CERN. Paul was joined on this project by Camilla Neale, an experienced choreographer.

Data visualisations was commissioned for the ballet and created by Peter Cook. Kinect code written by Alex Shaw from Glastonbridge Software.