As regular walkers we always check the Met Office weather
forecast before going out on a walk. We aren’t looking for pinpoint accuracy,
merely an indication of what to expect, what to wear and what to take with us
just in case. For hill walking we take waterproofs anyway, whatever the weather and whatever the
forecast.
In our experience Met Office forecasts are pretty good, but
in recent years they do not seem to be as reliable as they were. Often the
weather we actually get seems to have been better than the forecast, but
forecasts change throughout the day so this perception isn’t easy to nail down.
Of course there may be nothing to nail down. It may indeed
be a matter of perception. The Met Office puts so much resource into projecting
itself as the premier national authority on all matters meteorological that it
may inadvertently lead us into expecting more than it can possibly deliver.
Attaching names to storms, giving scary colour-coded warnings
about weather we once saw as normal, pushing the climate alarm game, all this may
create expectations which the Met Office cannot actually meet. We may not be
aware of having enhanced expectations but they may be there, in the background,
colouring our perceptions.
Our weather is variable and frequently unpredictable until
the moment it happens. Met Office predictions improve over the years but they
improve slowly and for all we know may not be improving at all at the moment. Promote,
promote, promote is the modern way, but as a supposedly sober, technical outfit
the Met Office may not be getting the balance right.
Today our local weather was significantly better than
forecast. We were not surprised.
4 comments:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPgnj5upihQ
Five minutes of Lena Horne
The algorithm for weather forecasting will have been written by an expert in MS Excel, and left to fiddle around with data at its leisure!
I know for certain that The Turrets is situated in an odd position which often defies the forecast, but this is not registered by the nerd's spreadsheet.
I have believed for a long time that the Met Office has since Mr Fish's wrong un in '87 steered towards the doom and gloom end with their forecasts so as to cover their backsides.
We recently had seven yellow warnings for thunderstorms heavy rain and localised flooding, nothing happened until the eighth warning.
even Short term forecasts change continually making them useless, but the most telling thing was speaking to a neighbour some years back about the subject and he was an amateur pilot with his own plane and they use a totally different branch of the Met Office forecasts for reasons that are to long to go into here.
Seaweed for me............
Demetrius - a much better presentation than Michael Fish.
Scrobs - we are in one of those situations too. Not always but often enough.
Wiggia - yes short term forecasts do change continually and that's a nuisance because they can change significantly in a few hours.
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