Partner Success with AWS / Aerospace / United Kingdom
BJSS Powers Space Weather Forecasts for the Met Office on AWS
Learn how the Met Office migrated its space weather forecasting systems to AWS for greater resilience, ease of international collaboration, and cost savings.
3
minutes for video generation, down from 1.5 hours
Minutes
to automatically deploy test environments, not hours
Providing
automated rollback capabilities
Overview
The UK’s Met Office does more than forecast weather on Earth—it does the same for space. This is because space weather events can have significant consequences for GPS, power networks, and other critical infrastructure. The office needs to work closely with forecasting centers in the US and Australia, and with academic partners. Migrating its mix of on-premises and hosted servers to Amazon Web Services (AWS) made it easier for these partners to access Met Office test environments and data. The migration was made possible with the help of AWS Partner BJSS. The service also provides high levels of resilience—critical for a system that must operate in times of crisis.
Opportunity | Forecasting Space Weather to Secure UK National Infrastructure
Forecasting space weather is a key responsibility for the Met Office, and space weather considered a significant risk on the UK’s National Risk Register. The Met Office provides forecasts and warnings for government agencies, emergency responders, and operators of critical infrastructure. Large space weather events will have a global, not just continental, impact, which can make it more difficult to find resources to restore systems.
The Met Office Space Weather Operations Centre (MOSWOC) works 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. MOSWOC works with centers in the US and Australia and needs the highest levels of availability. Systems must ingest data from space and earth sensors and analyze it quickly to provide timely forecasts. To do this, the Met Office previously relied on a complex mixture of on-premises and hosted services. However, maintaining this infrastructure took up engineers’ time, leading to slow and manual releases for new features or forecasting models.
We need the most resilient systems possible. We trusted AWS to provide that resilience while also providing good value for the taxpayer.”
Mark Gibbs
Head of Space Weather and Transport, Met Office
Solution | Accelerating Stronger Security Stance, Improved Resilience
BJSS and the Met Office already had a successful working relationship after a 2022 user experience project. For the migration to AWS, the two companies worked together to build a system that met the specific requirements of a globally collaborative research and forecasting organization. Improved resilience provided by the network of AWS data centers was vital to the new solution. Forecasters work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and must always be able to rely on system availability.
Space weather is a potential disruptor to power and communications networks. And big events are exactly when space weather forecasting would be most important to inform and guide government and utility emergency response. “We need the most resilient systems possible,” says Mark Gibbs, head of space weather and transport at the Met Office. “We trusted AWS to provide that resilience while also providing good value for the taxpayer.”
Forecasters run their models using Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), which allows the Met Office to deploy highly secure, reliable, and scalable containers on AWS Fargate, meaning users can run containers without thinking about servers or clusters. The Met Office is using Amazon CloudWatch to observe and monitor resources and applications on AWS. Amazon CloudWatch responds to performance changes, optimizes resource use, and gives the Met Office insights into the system’s operational health.
BJSS also configured Amazon CloudWatch to sends alarms to alert the right person to issues as soon as they arise. It also enabled composite alarms, a rule expression that accounts for the alarm states of other alarms to reduce alarm noise. This was needed to strengthen the Met Office security stance while reducing staff time spent on security management and dealing with false alarms. Finally, the migration to AWS enabled BJSS to set up a continuous delivery/continuous deployment (CI/CD) approach to transform and modernize the Met Office’s development process and help to automate the delivery of code from test to production environments.
Outcome | Faster Forecasting Video Generation, Easier Access for International Partners
The Met Office can now collaborate more effectively with the two other space forecasting centers in the US and Australia, and also with universities and researchers. “A key advantage of AWS is how it improves our ability to work with other partners,” says Gibbs. “Previously, providing access to on-premises systems was a real challenge. Using AWS, we’ve built a portal for academics to access our systems securely and run experimental algorithms. We can quickly adapt these for operational use.”
The new environment has also benefited the Met Office’s Ovation Service—a model that predicts where auroras will be visible on Earth in either the Northern (aurora borealis) or Southern (aurora australis) hemispheres. Video generation is required each time the forecasting model is run. This previously took Met Office systems 1.5 hours to complete for every forecast. Now this completes in 3 minutes with minimal infrastructure management.
With the CI/CD pipeline in place, developers can now make changes and get integration test results from an automatically deployed test environment in a matter of minutes. That process previously took several hours and many manual steps. A new release now takes just three clicks and minutes to run using an automated process. The new setup on AWS also provides backward consistency if a rollback is required.
Working with BJSS has also enabled the Met Office to move to a self-serve data model. That means both meteorologists and developers can get the data they need to run experiments more quickly and easily. Improving the data infrastructure also means that the Met Office is better able to take advantage of emerging technologies such as AI.
About Met Office
The Met Office was founded in 1854 to help keep UK seafarers safe. It began providing public weather forecasts in 1861. Today, it is the UK’s national meteorological service, providing critical weather services and world-leading climate science. The Met Office Space Weather Operations Centre (MOSWOC) is one of 3 space weather prediction centers around the world and provides space weather forecasts to the government and infrastructure operators.
About AWS Partner BJSS
BJSS is a technology and engineering consultancy headquartered in Leeds in the UK. With over 300 AWS certifications and 10 UK offices, it focuses on technical excellence and a client-driven delivery culture. BJSS collaborates to deliver software engineering, data and AI solutions, technology and business consulting, service design, cloud and platform services, and user experience solutions that millions of people use every day.
AWS Services Used
Amazon ECS
Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) is a fully managed container orchestration service that helps you to more efficiently deploy, manage, and scale containerized applications.
AWS Fargate
AWS Fargate is a serverless, pay-as-you-go compute engine that lets you focus on building applications without managing servers. Moving tasks such as server management, resource allocation, and scaling to AWS does not only improve your operational posture, but also accelerates the process of going from idea to production on the cloud, and lowers the total cost of ownership.
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Amazon CloudWatch
Amazon CloudWatch is a service that monitors applications, responds to performance changes, optimizes resource use, and provides insights into operational health.
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