please empty your brain below

As far as I understand, accurate forecasting is reserved for customers that pay. To expand, I know that accurate meteorological services are paid for and used by the insurance industry etc, often managed to geospecific locations. The conclusion I come to is that there are "Pop-weather" and "Real-weather" forecasts, and that we listen/watch to the red-top versions.

The "One drip" symbol is evil. That was the forecast for Glastonbury this year.

The Korean Met Office give a more detailed breakdown
http://web.kma.go.kr/eng/wis/wf\\_01.jsp
However their website can't even predict the date the next day when the month has 30 days in it...

It can't be beyond the computing power of the Met Office computers in Bracknell.

Or even Exeter, where they've been for the past couple of years...

dg apologises: Ah yes... delete, edit, re-publish

I remember when Newsnight replaced their nightly share-index update with a weather forecast a couple of years ago, Jeremy Paxman protested that it was utterly pointless because you couldn't describe the weather in under 10 seconds. One night there was rain forecast for all over the whole country and he summed it up as "No picnics."

Whatever the forecast, it's rarely accurate within 20 miles or so of the Suffolk coast. It's more useful to listen to the shipping forecast. Or ring a local farmer who pays for specific information, but even that's still often wrong.

why let the truth get in the way and spoil a good forecast - if they had been truthful about glastonbury think how much it would have dented the profits - all that money 'lost' and all over a few careless words!

and the beauty is, it's not like they're actually deliberately lying, they just sort of get it wrong... a bit

My great grandfather made a weather prediction for today about 100 years ago and it was surprisingly accurate. It was - tomorrow's weather will be pretty much like today's.

I too have often been a slave to the BBC 5 day forecast, and have been disappointed by how it deteriorates during the week. Best way to see if it is going to rain? Look up at the sky, if there's a black cloud nearby, yep! it's gonna rain! Use the old 'Red sky at night'rhyme too, to predict sunny days, it works.

The trouble is that it's very geographically variable as well as temporally variable. When you were having your downpour on Saturday, somewhere 20 miles down the road was having the sunny interval between showers.

It's only once you get to within 24-48 hours that they have even a chance of getting things right to that level of detail. Until then, the best they can do is say "light rain" and hope people have the nous to understand that there's quite a bit of variability around that.

It's not really a problem with the accuracy forecasting in my opinion, it's just the fact that "very changeable" isn't a useful forecast, no matter how accurate it is.

aha - I think what you're after is provided for the UK by Metcheck
[http://www.metcheck.com/V40/UK/FREE/today.asp?
zipcode=London]

They forecast the next week in 3 hr chunks per day, then morning / afternoon / evening for a further 7 days...

it's pretty reliable
and best of all, it's FREE!

ps. Zoe sent me











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