please empty your brain below
Since the BBC changed provider I have not used their weather forecasts.
I subscribed to Meteogroup's services on my old phone. They offered a 14-day forecast for years as part of their premium service - and it was hopeless. Anything beyond 5 or 6 days in the future reverted to a generic daily weather profile which was clearly not going to be right.
The only feature which was worth paying for was higher resolution radar.
The Met Office app, and that by Weather & Radar, both stick to 7 days with good reason.
As for the new 'old' projection on the BBC TV map. I've not done (through both CBA and a lack of trigonometrical knowhow) the maths, but it seems crazy in the new BBC forecasts to show large areas of uninhabited northern Scotland plus definitely uninhabited sea between Wick and Shetland (three times the distance of London to Brighton) ) - I suspect the percentage of screen filled by landmass (i.e. the useful bit) is now smaller.
On a mildly political note, it seems odd that the BBC was so quick to ditch a highly regarded operation that was set up to provide a public service for one that is owned by a global growth equity firm. Maybe they would like to go down that route themselves.... or maybe not.
Also, I’d like to say synoptic.
Predicting hourly weather a fortnight in advance is hardly more then guesswork. At least the old forecast was more general (more truthful?) after about five days.
I hadn't realised the switch was due to a change in provider (though I do remember the story now) so I'll be checking the Met Office site from now on.
1. My list of locations was wiped out so I could not easily work my way north checking the route of a journey from SW London to Glasgow. You can create a new list, but do not seem to be able to re-order it. The list has to be created in the desired order to start with. Very frustrating at 4.30am, when you need to get going.
2. The local maps with the weather sequence have got even harder to read. There is even more detail in the background photo, so the information laid on top is very hard to make out.
3. My location has been removed, I cannot have Kingston upon Thames anymore. There's KT2 instead, an area far too small to have a distinctive climate.
All very annoying and we pay a poll tax for this
I look forward to their Eye of Sauron projecting thunderstorm locations in the summer 2 weeks before they happen !
» Met Office say 3am-9am on Monday 19th
» Meteo Group say 8am-noon on Tuesday 27th
It'd be interesting to see if either of them is correct, or even close.
Does this mean that it will/should rain for 20% of the time, or that it will rain in 20% of the area under reference, or that it might or might not rain and they are giving you racing odds?
Not that we can do much about it, anyway.
dg writes: There's a definition (for 20%) halfway down the post. The next two links give a more detailed explanation, one for Meteo Group and one for the Met Office.
It was akin to a game of pooh sticks.
Before you let the stick go you can easily predict it's initial direction, but as you let it go the currents and eddys and other influences take hold and the stick still travels downstream but not where you originally expected it to go. Rob McElwee perhaps?
Just shows how complex the forecast models are...
I only had to tell it once that I was in London, it's stored as a cookie, and it remembered it forever ...
Now i have to click MORE than once to get to my local weather, and it seemingly helps if you're signed into the BBC, so you can add a favourite location.
How is this better? It's not. More clicks, less privacy.
The workaround is to obviously have a shortcut to your local postcode and always click on that, but ... why? Why should we have to have a workaround to cope with with something that has become inferior.
The new design is also inferior, too much white, looks very bland, and yes - no one needs 14 day forecasts because they are in no way accurate enough.
for the current week there's strips of yellow and green, and there's no logic to it, or what they mean .. i have no idea what they're supposed to represent.
The weather systems we get are generated in the Atlantic and take between 4 to 7 days to reach us, so there is no way to predict more than 7 days because the weather system hasn't been created yet. 14-days forecasts are a gimmick.
I read it as a 20% chance of rain ie very low, rather than a 'probability' which I think conjures up mental images of it being more ... probable!
I rarely look at the website and just get my forecasts from the BBC news at 10, and I must say I HATE the new graphics on there. The national map is now too small as to be useless for pinpointing your location!
The same with the local SE weather! The map used to give a variety of ever changing locations around the capital, and was detailed enough that I could pinpoint my location by the placement of bodies of water. Now it's a generic 'London' which covers most of the west/central of the zone anyway!
Then the boxes with symbols & temperature are too small and too quick to actually take in at the end as they rush to finish.
I'm a visual person so liked the old-style with the varying shades of colour denoting temperature too! Easy to see at a glance without needing to pay too much attention! Everything is a shade of green-grey-blue now, so must be useless for whole swathes of people.
"When will it next rain in London? "
Both way off - it's raining here as I write this.
I’ve been looking at Wundermap (WeatherUnderground site) recently. They show information from lots of local Personal Weather Stations all over the world, mostly in real time (depending when that particular PWS info is updated) and then use that data to create local forecasts. These seem to be much more accurate than the BBC, especially for the hourly slots and seem to update with any changes very quickly, presumably based on what’s being reported back by other PWSs in the surrounding area. I think that the same information is used by some apps (see Wiki) to provide weather information.
One thing that is interesting is that you are able to view a PWS in detail so see that day’s records and past daily records for as far back as the PWS has been on WU. Past weather events, such as the local conditions during Hurricane Harvey make interesting viewing.
Not knowing exactly where Diamond Geezer Towers is, I am sure that this PWS is somewhere nearby:, although its records only go back to 2016
One caveat is the accuracy of each PWS. A PWS can be anything from something at the cheaper range to up to £1000+ and will also depend on how correctly the sensor(s) are placed. However, from experience of looking at various stations in an area, they are generally pretty good. Not every PWS has all sensors.
The site location storage changes annoyed me as well. Whilst I can see that having a profile may be of use when using a mobile and wandering around in different areas, there is no reason to do away with the system of storing locations in a cookie as they did in the past. On principle, I'm not giving the BBC (or anybody else) personal details so that they can potentially track me and thus have data to sell on.
I started bookmarking specific locations, but then I found that when you click on the box to "Enter a town ....." a drop down list of towns visited will enable a previously used town to be selected. This is fine, but if visiting lots of places, I assume that the list will get longer, although it looks as if it can be edited. Presumably the list is stored in a cookie, but it would be much simpler to have kept the old arrangement of Favourites.
DG's observations about the timeliness of rainfall arriving at pretty much spot on. I tend to use Netweather's rainfall radar page as a reasonable indicator of where rain is and how quickly it's moving "on the day". Their forecasts aren't bad but as everyone has said trying to forecast 14 days out is crazy in the UK. The other BBC annoyance is their "weather for the week ahead" forecast used to be updated at 8 or 9pm and gave a reasonable view ahead. Now you're lucky if it appears at 10pm and the content has become appreciably worse. All in all the change to Meteogroup is not at all impressive. The Met Office weren't perfect and had their critics but they were better than what we have now.
Accuweather has a useful MinuteCast that shows the chance of rain in the next two hours, and I've found it generally accurate. Amazingly, it also has daily forecasts for the next 90 days: it would be interesting to see whether any given day varies as much as BBC Meteo.
Interestingly, the BBC Meteo site was quietly running in parallel before the official switchover, and the results were noticeably less pessimistic than the BBC Met site. But one of my main gripes was that the BBC Met forecasts for any given day varied so wildly as to be almost useless, and so far it seems that the new site isn't much better in this respect.
The funniest thing is that BBC Meteo describes virtually every day as 'breezy'. The most irritating things are that they're still not confident enough to show the weather at the current time (only from the top of the next hour), the units settings are very finicky because of cookies or whatever, and the desktop version still insists on using buggy old Flash.
As they look very like the pre-change BBC graphics, I now find the ITV weather forecasts, nationally and locally, so much better than the BBC's, and they come free of charge.
All very sad, a reputational injury inflicted on itself by the BBC.
"On the old weather site we used the week's pressure maps to give us a feel for what was likely pending and the probability was there to view. Not allowed now, that's obviously too intellectual."
When I were a lad, surface pressure maps were part of the geography O-level syllabus. And, at least at my school, geography was not an optional subject.
As for "20% probability of rain", it means if you go out on five different days when rain is 20% probable, you will get wet on one of them. But whether it's comparable to a lottery ("It could be you") or a meteorite strike ("We'll all go together if we go"), depends on the nature of the weather patterns being forecast. If showers are forecast, someone will get wet - it could be you. If a hurricane is approaching but its course is uncertain, either everyone will get wet, or no-one.
https://www.yr.no/
Amazingly it covers various parts of the world, and links to some good webcams too.
dg writes: It first rained yesterday morning, almost exactly in line with the Met Office's forecast four days earlier.
The Met Office is far more accurate than MeteoGroup, who are singularly poor.
The Met Office lost the BBC contract partly on political grounds -- the Beeb weren't going to give a govt body money when the govt was making them pay for the World Service -- but also the Met Office service was horrendously unreliable, with the data required for the website, apps, and even TV forecasts often delivered late or garbled. The Met Office trades on 'no-one ever got fired for buying IBM', but that's simply not enough these days.
The last week of February has proven to be the coldest and snowiest week in years, with temperatures failing to creep above freezing.
The 14 day forecast was indeed rubbish, despite meteorologists being well aware of 'Sudden Stratospheric Warming' at the time, and the pinch of salt I mentioned is scattered across the nation's roads and pavements.
When did they realize that lots of snow was on the way?
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