The changing role of operational meteorology towards a transdisciplinary approach to future weather and climate services

This paper describes the role of operational meteorology from a single disciplinary standpoint through to multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary and, more recently, transdisciplinary approaches and what this means for future forecasting systems. We start from the foundation of a single meteorological discipline: in this case, the forecasting of wind speed and direction that led to the creation of the first gale warning service in the wake of the ‘Royal Charter Storm’ in 1859. We build on this, giving further examples of where multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary methods have enhanced our understanding of observed meteorological and hydrometeorological phenomena from multiple perspectives, to produce a more holistic understanding of the effect of weather and climate on the ‘whole of society’. An exemplar of this is the integration of meteorology and hydrology to create the UK’s first hydrometeorological profession through the Flood Forecasting partnership between the Met Office and the Environment Agency. We end our discussion by exploring the move to a transdisciplinary approach through living labs: we believe this is vital to increase societal resilience to ever-more extreme weather events driven by anthropogenic warming. This article is part of the discussion meeting issue ‘Hydrology in the 21st century: challenges in science, to policy and practice’.