Does anyone trust the Met office anymore?

[Crackle]

They don't even seem to be able to get the days forecast right anymore, never mind 5 days, you're better off sticking your head out the window or holding up two divining rods and chanting. How can they be so feckin inept, I mean really how can they be. I've got a creaky knee which is better at it than them and would make a far more interesting spectacle on telly. I know, why don't they just point the fecking camera at the sky rather than the the muppet in the studio or base their forecast on people e-mailing in, I'm sure it would be more accurate.

/rant

 

[HLaB]

Just to rant also :-) All week they've been saying it'll be wet down south but dry up north, this morning they've changed their mind, its to be the other way round. I don't trust them though so I think I'll look out the window before I head off tomorrow.

 

[hackbike 666]

Yes I do...I wont go for all this Daily Mail slag everything off lark.

 

[Bollo]

BBC weatherman Tomasz-Schafernaker gives the Met Office's response....

 

[Crackle]

I was waiting for that, my Bollo predictor was spot on.

 

[Bollo]

I was waiting for that, my Bollo predictor was spot on.

Sounds like a particularly unnerving pregnancy test!

Tomasz and his Cray-poking chums better be f***** spot on tomorrow as I'm off for a circuit of the Isle of Wight. Rain clearing in time for landfall at East Cowes. Anything else and I'll be peeved.

 

[Yellow Fang]

It's a funny thing with weather reports, that the more they explain, the less I can remember.

 

[JamesAC]

I suppose it's all been said before, but: A forecast is a forecast, not a timetable. Meteorologists attempt to predict, with varying degrees of certainty (but never 100%), what the weather will be in the future. But Britain being where it is, with a large mass of ocean on the left, and large mass of land on the right, and the jet stream wiggling about overhead, makes accurate prediction pretty tricky, especially when the weather pattern is unsettled, as it is at the present.

What beats me is how sure people are that they will win the Lottery - you see then queuing up in Sainsbury's spending wedges of dosh. Fat chance!

 

[byegad]

Seven years ago they were pretty good. I was commuting to work by bike and the daily 3h forecast would say dry before 9am and wet until 3pm and it was so.
Yesterday morning I checked the same forecast to be told it was dry all day. As I opened the curtains 20 seconds after I checked it was tanking down. In fact all day it was either p***ing down or about to p*** down and the forecast still said it would be fine all day.

Is this a sigh that the weather is now more unpredictable or the forecasters are a lot worse that than they were seven years ago????

Is this a sign of climate change?

 

[Crackle]

Sounds like a particularly unnerving pregnancy test!

Tomasz and his Cray-poking chums better be f***** spot on tomorrow as I'm off for a circuit of the Isle of Wight. Rain clearing in time for landfall at East Cowes. Anything else and I'll be peeved.

Ooh! Watch out for my 'what is there to do on the Isle of Wight' thread. I'm off there in a week for the first time ever.

 

[Bollo]

About 12 years ago I worked on a project with a group of Royal Navy Metocs (the navy's above and below water forecasters). I was the there to (a) stop them drinking (b) assess various forecasting tools from a software integration viewpoint (c) with my physics/modelling background, act as an interpreter between the Metocs and the software developers and (d) stop them drinking.

Anyways, over the course of 9 months I got to visit the old met office in Bracknell a few times and have dealings with MeteoFrance (soz for missing accents!) as well. In that time, the Metocs taught me the basics of forecasting, and I also picked up bits and bobs from the software. Despite the jokes, I walked away with a real appreciation of forecasters' skills. Even with the detailed raw field data kicked out by the supercomputers, there's a definite art to their interpretation and refinement to produce a forecast that stands a high probability of being accurate for most people most of the time.

I imagine thre's probably some old sods in the bowels of the Met Office that will claim that the 'old skills' of forecasting are being lost as the computer models improve. There may possibly be some truth in it. I always felt that the Met Office deserved a fly-on-the-wall doc to give people a better understanding of what they do.

 

[Crankarm]

Nope. Haven't done so since the hurricane of 1987 that hit the South coast. It would be laughable if the clowns in the Met Office weren't in receipt of public funds .............

An awful shower the lot of them.

 

[Bollo]

Ooh! Watch out for my 'what is there to do on the Isle of Wight' thread. I'm off there in a week for the first time ever.

I'll be watching. And waiting.....

Bit of the curate's egg, the Island. Some lovely bits and people, some quite unpleasant bits of both as well.

This being a cycling forum, would it be considered bad taste to recommend taking your bike?

 

[Crackle]

This being a cycling forum, would it be considered bad taste to recommend taking your bike?

Off road only, as I'll have the kids and dog and shalt be relying on running for my own ends. And I shall need a Bollo forecast too.

 

[Dave5N]

Not after Blair Peach.