I was just thinking about why a strike by the Met Office is always doomed to failure before it starts, and that's because so many of the various Met Office systems are fully automated, and as long as they don't fail, either through a hardware or software fault they will continue to run, possibly indefinitely barring a complete comms failure.

It's true operational staff add value to products that are already produced by the various NWP models, but I also imagine that a lot of forecast data is transmitted without it ever being seen by anyone, let alone a forecaster.. To get the maximum effect from a 24 hour strike these operational systems would need be to shut down before the staff left the building and somehow I can't see that happening.

Years ago when we went on strike the temperature and rainfall wasn't read at 0900 and 2100 on the day of the strike, but now we have AWS, so the observational and climate data is safe.

From home I can see weather radar images and satellite imagery from the Met Office web site, I can see observational and forecast data from the Met Office DataPoint site, I can see UK SYNOPs courtesy of FSU & OGIMET, I can see the latest TAFs & METARs courtesy of the ADDS service. BBC TV weather is probably showing me the latest NWP on TV. In comparison to what a lot of the outstations received in the way of data in the 1970's and 1980's that's a wealth of information enough to run a forecast office.

I think that all the strike will achieve is highlight to the public that the Met Office computer systems that are in place are so resilient that they hardly need people at all, so why do we need so many? Obviously some systems such as gale warnings and alerts aren't fully automatic at the moment, but I should imagine work on automating these systems are in the pipe-line.

In the foyer of the Met Office in a few years time, you will probably find a plaque above the door that reads:

"Will the last person to leave the Met Office please turn out the lights - but for God's sake don't turn off the servers or the super-computer!"