The UK Met Office was the first government-funded organisation to indicate that they were interested in using Atlas for significant computations. They had used the Manchester and Harwell Mercury computers and purchased a Mercury of their own in 1959 which was able to run a simple two-level model of the troposphere for the north-eastern Atlantic and Europe on a 320 km grid out to 36 hours ahead. It took several hours to run a forecast. Throughout the life of Atlas, the Met Office made considerable use of Atlas in developing their long range forecasting despite purchasing their own KDF9 in 1965. The Rutherford Laboratory purchased an IBM 360/195 computer in 1971 and the Met Office in 1972.
The Met Office Mercury
