On February 9, 2026, the Met Office launched a major upgrade to its national forecasting system aimed at providing people in Thorpe St Andrew, Norfolk, with more accurate local alerts and earlier warnings for extreme weather. The new system is intended to give clearer notice about heavy rain, strong winds and the potential for flooding across the community.
The system runs on a new Microsoft Azure-based supercomputer. Met Office and Microsoft materials say it enables the processing of roughly 50 billion weather observations a day, although some Met Office documents cite larger totals (around 215 billion) depending on how observations are counted. The Met Office says the upgrade will allow it to produce 14‑day local forecasts with a similar level of accuracy to today’s seven‑ to nine‑day forecasts, effectively extending the reliable local forecast window and giving households and schools more time to prepare for storms.
The update is particularly important for homes and businesses near the tidal River Yare, where a phenomenon called tide‑locking can cause water to back up and flood local streets. The Environment Agency will be able to use the higher‑resolution data to provide more precise flood alerts for riverside properties and local road networks.
Professor Simon Vosper, Director of Science at the Met Office, said the quality of rainfall forecasts has improved markedly and that the upgrade delivers tangible improvements that will make forecasts easier to interpret. Met Office materials also note that colder‑season temperatures can now be forecast with greater precision, helping local councils plan winter gritting more accurately for specific neighbourhoods.
