So, if you do not like "grumpy old man" rants look away.
Yesterday, the BBC weather forecast had heavy clouds and a 70% chance of rain. The Met Office forecast said dry, sunny and light clouds. In the end I cut my front lawn and hedge yesterday afternoon.
OK, I know the UK weather is hard to predict, but honestly, you simply could not use the forecasts as they were so different.
This morning it was supposed to be dark clouds and thunder. We had light cloud, sun and warm!
It bugs me that we simply do not know. I reckon they have a phone call and say, "you say this and we'll say that. One of us is bound to be right".😀
So now we have the forecasts for Monday. Yet again the Met Office and the BBC differ greatly to the extent that both are useless.
ReplyDeleteHi Roger,
ReplyDeleteThis is something I've also noticed. It seems to have got a lot worse since earlier this year when the BBC switched their weather service provider from the UK based MET office to MeteoGroup who is a commercial weather organisation based in Europe.
Although the MeteoGroup probably use the same raw data as the MET Office, BEing primarily Europe based (as can be seen from the main weather map on the BBC forecasts, where the UK is now well off to the side with Germany and France in the center) I don't think they have the same experience of dealing with the complexities of the UK weather systems (being a small island surrounded by the sea) that the MET Office have built up over a long period of time.
The new BBC graphics provided by MeteoGroup are awful and wildly inacurate, and their web based offerings are difficult to navigate and imprecise in detail. The old MET Office forecasts were pretty good and if you looked at the animated maps in the morning, you could estimate future rain showers to an accuracy of typically 15-30 Mins
The whole thing is crazy and another example of not having joined up thinking. Despite publicity to the contrary, both the BBC and MET Office are really still government Quangos.
So it would have been better for the BBC to continue with the MET Office and to provide accurate forecasts, rather than go through the motions of "the BBC stating that it is legally obliged to ensure that licence fee payers get the best value for money" and ending up providing reports that are actually worthless.
Read the comments section of this page
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/internet/entries/dc3468bf-dd27-4c25-ae92-7622d6ba3e48
Grrrr.....
Martin