Does anyone trust the Met office anymore?
- Thread starter Crackle
- Start date
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Arch
Married to Night Train
- Location
- Salford, UK
Yeah, but that's the BBC. Every media outlet says that, about every topic.
The Met office isn't the BBC.
I don't bother too much about the weather forecast anyway. At work, we have to go out anyway, and at the weekend I decide what to do based on what it looks like - I might try and arrange a ride so that I have any strong wind behind me on the way back, but I'm well aware that the wind can back or veer quickly, and indeed very locally, so a prevailing forecast can easily be wrong.
Globalti
Legendary Member
I find them accurate enough but I supplement the forecasts by looking at the Atlantic weather charts and trying to predict the weather myself. It ain't that hard.
What annoys me and Mrs Gti about our local BBC TV weather is that they spend the first minute of the forecast telling us what the weather has been doing today, before getting onto telling us what it's going to do.
What annoys me and Mrs Gti about our local BBC TV weather is that they spend the first minute of the forecast telling us what the weather has been doing today, before getting onto telling us what it's going to do.
I use the rain radar at http://www.raintoday.co.uk/ and judge for myself.
beanzontoast
Guru
- Location
- South of The Peaks
Like this one - far more detail than on the met office site's map. Thanks for posting it!
I've pretty much given up placing any reliance on the BBC or Met Office forecasts. We tend to watch the BBC one very early in the morning and I have no idea how 'old' it is or whether it was recorded the night before, but it doesn't seem very accurate to me. Like others, lost count of the number of times they've said to expect one thing and we actually get the opposite. Especially at the moment, the weather's all over the shop. We were having some building work done week before last and the Met Office said fine pm whereas local radio said heavy rain. We actually got the worst thunderstorms we've had all year.
If they really can't predict with a decent probability - say 80% confidence - what's going to happen, I'd rather they just said: "Look - we don't have a clue what it's going to be like so here for the next 3 minutes is a nice picture of a rainbow instead".
Met office have a good rainfall radar display at http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/public/pws/invent/weathermap/ Just click the rainfall layer button on the right. You can already see what is coming along tonight!
Re forecasts - all the weather models are having problems with the current synoptics so it's a bit hard on the Met Office when every major forecaster is in the same boat.
The met office weather model verification stats put their model in the world's top three overall. That is quite an achievement in itself but it doesn't mean the Met Office will always be right for all of the year. There is still human assessment of all the data available and they wil not follow their own model's output if they think it is not handling the current weather correctly.
Btw, many website 5 day forecasts are based on model output wiith no human scrutiny, which means these are inherently unreliable.
John
Re forecasts - all the weather models are having problems with the current synoptics so it's a bit hard on the Met Office when every major forecaster is in the same boat.
The met office weather model verification stats put their model in the world's top three overall. That is quite an achievement in itself but it doesn't mean the Met Office will always be right for all of the year. There is still human assessment of all the data available and they wil not follow their own model's output if they think it is not handling the current weather correctly.
Btw, many website 5 day forecasts are based on model output wiith no human scrutiny, which means these are inherently unreliable.
John
biggs682
Itching to get back on my bike's
- Location
- Northamptonshire
well today we were meant to have rain and a weather warning for overnight , so far 25 c and no rain so no
I think it worth keeping an eye on the radar tonight. Not that you can do much about it but keeping gutters and drains clear helps.
Last night the forecast for my region was heavy, possibly thundery showers. We got nothing but on my ride out this morning, five miles north of here was still awash. The forecast for the region was right - just not for where I live.
Part of the problem is that a forecast is what the weather might be and how confident the forecaster is in that happening. This qualification gets squeezed out in the dumbing down process of presenting a map with pretty graphics where there is no room for anything other than absolutes.
I could go on to moan about a BBC weather map whose layout is seen as the right way to show the UK, presumably by someone in a design dept, when in fact it is just an artefact of making it conform to the view of how the UK is seen from geostationary satellites.
John
automatic_jon
Guest
There's a Weather Channel widget on my phone which finds the phone's location and displays a current conditions and 5 day forecast. The current conditions are usually pretty accurate but I know what the weather is like at the time, I'm usually cycling through it. The 5 day forecast updates every hour, usually to the absolute opposite of what it said for its previous update. How can the forecast for tomorrow go from clear skies and 23 to rain and 15 and back again in an afternoon, it erodes my confidence in something which seems to be essentially witchcraft to start with.
sometimes. The BBC got this morning's forecast for our ride down to Whitstable wrong (although, strange to say, Metcheck got it right), and both teh BBC and Metcheck told us that the April FNRttC would be dry, and it rained pretty much solidly for the first three hours.
Crankarm
Guru
- Location
- Nr Cambridge
The reason weather forecasting is as poor as it ever was is because all forecasts are now reached using computer models. Forecasters don't actually analyse raw data anymore. 99.99% of them wouldn't know what to do with the info anyway. Hence the request for members of the public to call the Met Office to adivse what the weather is doing locally so the Met Office can formulate a forecast for the whole country.
HLaB
Marie Attoinette Fan
I've got to admit the met got it right yesterday in the end; they said if I headed south east it'd be a glorious if not windy day. They also said it'd be pi$$ing down today and they were right on that account too!
I'm told that the Island is rather good for the off-roading, although I don't lean that way myself.
Saturday night's forecast promised a dry run. Sunday morning we were promised light rain. The truth was way, way different......
Going anticlockwise from Cowes to take advantage of the winds along the south coast, it stayed dry until Yarmouth. Then we had light rain. Then heavy rain. And then very heavy rain. And low cloud, which we had the pleasure of climbing into along the Military Road beyond Freshwater and up to Blackgang. Biblical.
So, in the style of Crank....
The Met Office are a robdog weather quango who p1ss taxpayers' money up against Exeter Cathedral writing so-called forecasts while using their supercomputers to surf for kiddie-p0rn, send 4-1-9 scamming emails and clone credit cards. B^&%rds!
