Pangeo — the award-winning data platform!

Last week the Met Office travelled to London for the Real IT Awards, or RITA for short. These awards are hosted by the Corporate IT Forum and recognise achievements by corporate organisations in the UK. They have a particular emphasis on teamwork and innovation.

This year the Met Office were nominated in three categories:

• Service Hub, our new internal data portal was nominated for Enterprise Team of the Year and Project of the Year (+£250k)
• The next generation of National Severe Weather Warning Service, our updated system for issuing all of the UK’s official weather warnings, was nominated for Legacy System Migrations and Project of the Year (+£250k)
• And finally, Pangeo, a flexible approach for analysing big environmental datasets, was nominated for Innovative Use of Cloud Technologies

This is the first time the Met Office has been nominated in so many categories. Whilst the Met Office often conjures images of Michael Fish for people in the UK, we’re one of the foremost data technology companies in the world: we generate truly huge amounts of data on one of the most advanced supercomputers in the world, and process information ranging from climate change research to TV weather forecasts. That requires a huge amount of cutting edge IT development, and the Met Office are proud to be recognised as leaders in this area.

Pangeo was awarded the first runner up in its category. Firstly, congratulations to the members of the Informatics Lab who have been working hard on this project since it started as the Jupyter and Dask Environment (Jade) prototype. The judges also particularly appreciated that Pangeo has grown to become a vibrant international community — so a huge congratulations to all of you as well.

Thanks Pangeans!