The 1950s saw the UK’s Meteorological Office (MO), expand its provision of public weather services substantially. Influenced by US Weather Bureau practice, the new Director of the MO, Oliver Graham Sutton, sought to make weather information more available to the general public. To justify the increased government investment that such an expansion and broadening of services required, Sutton and other senior figures at the MO, influenced by German and US practice, began to explicitly highlight the economic benefits of their services across all sectors of British society. Adopting a cost-benefit approach, the MO began referring to products rather than services and customers rather than users. Such an approach also saw services created for specific user groups separated from, and on occasion replaced by, broader services for the public.

By investigating the increased MO emphasis on the utility of its services, this paper explores conflict within the organisation between its state role in protecting civilians and property, and its provision of more commercial services, which were considered the realm of private companies in many other countries. The emergence of MO services as sellable products was clearly highlighted by the opening of regional weather centres throughout 1959-61; high-street premises with a shop front where both the housewife and the businessman could call in and purchase weather and climate products.

Many of the public services the MO began to offer in this period were influenced by new meteorological understanding and technological capabilities. In developing new forecasting methods into weather services the MO made decisions on how to communicate the organisation’s scientific expertise to the public. Questions on the use of probabilistic versus deterministic language during forecasts, bespoke forecasts versus repeatable generalised services, and regional versus national scale forecasts all had to be addressed. From 1953-1961, the public weather service provision of the MO not only expanded, but became more business-like in approach. In turn this shift in emphasis influenced many of the organisation’s decisions on how to produce and communicate forecasts to the public. Through investigating these changes this paper charts how the MO took new meteorological approaches and technologies and developed them into marketable products, which would appeal to a broad spectrum of British society.