"Philip Eden" philipATweatherHYPHENukDOTcom wrote snip
Shame it won't reach 200. Shall we have a sweepstake?

I'll start the ball rolling and offer a generous 172. The end comes
when no part of the MO(1) remains a central government-
funded and controlled(2) service.
snip
Send your tenners to me!

.... no money from me I'm afraid, but I can't disagree with Philip's
general diagnosis - both here and in his recent book (Daily Telegraph -
Book of the Weather); the 'status quo' surely cannot be maintained -
indeed of course, the 'situation' has been creeping through change for
some years: another 'change' is about to be 'engineered' as regards the
Met Office - sometime later this year.

I wonder more though whether greater European integration will also
force change - will not someone in the Brussels / Strasbourg 'axis' turn
eyes on the great conundrum that is the running of global models from
several centres (EC, UKMO, MF, DWD)? Not to mention a sprinkling of
local / regional-scale models, driven not necessarily by the former:
some provided with boundary data from the GFS for example.

There is also the basic MET data provision, collation, analysis &
storage question. Do we need this to be split up amongst the nation
states? Why not a central organisation funded by the EU? Is this not
already the way the Satellite and (perhaps to a lesser extent) the radar
observation of our continent is proceeding?

Martin.