Meteorological Monitoring System

The Met Office, providers of environmental, weather and climate services currently operate a network of manual, automatic and semi-automatic meteorological measuring and observing sites at more than 280 locations in the United Kingdom and a small number overseas, for real-time data acquisition.

CSE Servelec (UK) has provided an enterprise SCADA solution as the backbone of their Meteorological Monitoring System (MMS).

The MMS replaced several previous legacy systems and allows data from meteorological sensors to be gathered and stored at the Met Office headquarters in Exeter. The system enables the Met Office to carry out data processing and analysis centrally in a flexible and manageable way. The observations are fundamental to almost all the services the Met Office provides - as direct data and products; for initialising numerical weather prediction models; for verification of forecasts; as the basis for many weather/climate related consultancy services; and for providing evidence of climate change.

More frequent data sampling, additional data from existing sensors, or the addition of new sensors is made possible with the MMS. This versatile and scalable observing infrastructure allows operational and maintenance costs to be reduced, as well as technical risks. Data is delivered to a modularised central processing system enabling a more efficient management and support structure.

System inputs, such as radiation, air quality or hydrology can be fully integrated. The system is also dynamic and adaptable to customer needs, for example frequency and quality can be altered.

The MMS is based on CSE Servelec's well-established Telemetry and SCADA application suite, SCOPE-X.

SCOPE-X implements a fully redundant duplicated real-time database seamlessly united to an Oracle long-term historic database and flexible data interfaces.

SCOPE is a family of products that meets current and future requirements for SCADA and Telemetry systems. SCOPE provides non-stop monitoring and utilises high levels of redundancy, reliability and robust software design to offer high availability and low maintenance requirements.

The real-time integration of data into management information systems allows users through the business to access data for making informed and independent decisions.

Flexible system architectures meet the requirements of a range of applications, from a simplex single site SCADA to enterprise wide systems.

The client application is browser-based and provides a fully functional user interface supplying the tools and utilities necessary to configure, maintain and operate the system.

SCOPE-X is widely used in the Utility sectors and in some more specialised sectors for wide area applications.

CSE Servelec's current list of blue chip users of SCOPE-X includes BAA/Heathrow, British Broadcasting Corporation - BBC Transmission (now NGW) and BBC World Service, National Grid Gas, Welsh Water, Southern Water, Wessex Water, Trinity House and the Environment Agency.