BBC Weather app suffers 'glitch' - as 'hurricane force' winds and temperatures 'over 400C' forecast
The BBC has apologised to users after its weather app mistakenly showed forecasts for "hurricane force" winds near London and temperatures over 400C in Nottingham.
Apparently it's rather blustery in Matlock too, wind speed too large to fit into the little black circle, but it looks like nearly 6000mph. Best not wear a hat.
6 comments:
Two things are certain when the US Media hypes up a hurricane. (i) The storm will be weaker than previously reported when it reaches the coast. (ii) The windspeed will make people from, for example, Shetland wonder what all the fuss is about.
Mrs DiscoveredJoys and I have found that a weather forecast is generally reliable... but not from the same organisation for every day. Whatever the source, weather forecasts are generally unreliable on the 'should I wear a mac' basis. So we just look out the window instead.
As good a time as any, perhaps, for one of my favourite quotes from ‘Three Men in a Boat’ (on the subject of barometers):
‘I tapped it again the next morning, and it went up still higher, and the rain came down faster than ever. On Wednesday I went and hit it again, and the pointer went round towards "set fair," "very dry," and "much heat," until it was stopped by the peg, and couldn't go any further.
It tried its best, but the instrument was built so that it couldn't prophesy fine weather any harder than it did without breaking itself. It evidently wanted to go on, and prognosticate drought, and water famine, and sunstroke, and simooms, and such things, but the peg prevented it, and it had to be content with pointing to the mere commonplace "very dry."
Meanwhile, the rain came down in a steady torrent, and the lower part of the town was under water, owing to the river having overflowed.’
Macheath's quoted passage is superb, and just shows how good Victorian science fiction could be. It actually mentions a river bursting its banks and flooding a town - well over a hundred years before global warming caused these things to happen! What an amazing imagination Jerome had!
Reassuring to know we can trust the Fish successors implicitly with our lives.
dearieme - yes, I think the media generally look around the internet for the highest estimated wind speed, stir in some hype about potential damage and go with that.
DJ - we look at two forecasts, check the rainfall radar, look out of the window and go with that.
Macheath - ha ha, I remember that quote. I was never confident about our barometer in the days when we had one hanging on the wall. It never varied much from "Fair", whatever the conditions outside.
Sam - good point. Jerome must have foreseen how burning all that coal could heat up the whole globe, come close to ushering in the next ice age before suddenly switching to catastrophic warming and the previously unknown phenomenon of flooded towns.
James - and there is nothing exaggerated or Fishy about it.
Post a Comment