Fire Risk

It's called 'cloudcry' - still no cloudcrying here in Surrey, though.

 

I've been watching the rain coming up from Biscay on weather radar - as usual, it is very intense but its area is diminishing rapidly as it heads towards us. Previous events have fizzled in exactly this way, so, unless it peps up again as it crosses the channel, it is going to be yet another (not very) damp squib.

 

I cross-refer the BBC with metcheck. Metcheck has been more accurate to date, and it's not predicting much rain at all. I think the BBC model reverts to norm to easily

 

The BBC's weather contractor is MeteoGroup - not good.

 

Yes indeed, yet again the BBC forcast decent SE rain starting may be 5 days ahead. Move on a couple of days and the rain is no longer forcast.

Bryan

 

I though they had ditched MeteoGroup?

Or has that not happened yet.

Whoever it is, using a bit of seaweed and the number of berries on the bushes would probably give more accurate results.

We need the French to start up their Normandy thunder storms again - the vintage that tracks NE across the channel to Kent.

Bryan

 

No, still with MeteoGroup. It isn't just the accuracy of the BBC forecasts, it's their consistency even within their own web site - daily detailed breakdowns for locations very frequently don't resemble the text that accompanies them!

 

Agreed. Applies to Met Office too though. Sometimes the local area website forecast summary says one thing, the hour by hour one looks completely different. Part of the problem may be that one part of the forecast is 100% automatically generated from computer modelling, whereas the textual summary is a human forecaster’s best guess after viewing data from many sources.

 

Forecasting appears as computer models increase to become less of a science and more guess work.
Yes the BBC Meteo results were especially bad last week (I had to suffer the indecision over an event on the seafront my wife was involved in on Thursday. Met Office had rain for a lot of that day from the beginning of the week at a high percentage. Meteo had little and by Wednesday Meteo said dry all day. It actually rained 3 times quite heavily, but only for about 10 mins each time.
Should we be surprised? watch a Grand Prix and whichever model each team uses seems to end up with a spread between heavy rain in 5 minutes and no rain at all.
I notice forecasts seem to often come with a disclaimer of "likely" these days.

 

Probably, but that still leaves a situation where there are two versions of a place's forecast - no wonder the average person thinks weather forecasts are so often wrong!

 

The web forecasts fall massively for the spurious accuracy of hour-by-hour. The vast majority of weather in this country is bands moving from west to east.

Bill Giles and some magnetic clouds give a much better idea of what's happening than than somewhat arbitrary hour-by-hour numbers.

Although, to be frank, I've just come back from the Manx, and their weather wizards have got it right every day for two weeks. So let's borrow them

 

Yeah, but if you are an island stuck out in the Irish Sea, isn’t “wet” pretty much going to sum it up every day?

I lived in LA for a couple of years. Forecasting there was dead easy. For nine months it was “hot, dry, wind carried dust off the desert”. For three months it was “slightly cooler, odd showers”. The changeover day - when you got the first heavy shower on roads covered in nine months of dust and oil - was “freeway carnage day”.

Tom

 

Que?



Where is the desert around LA?

 

Heh! It's usually "showers in Peel" or "Fog on the mountain" (basically "not doing what it needs to, but in some other place, so you are standing in glorious sunshine wondering why there is no racing...)

The saying is "if you don't like the weather, wait 15 minutes and you'll get a different one". In weather, as with so many things, the Island is sometimes like the UK, and sometimes not, with no obvious rhyme or reason

 

Mojave!

Tom

 

Dartmoor?

 

Tom will no doubt answer that specific point.

But once the wind picks up dust from an arid area (my experience is in the semi-desert Karoo region of South Africa) it can travel a long way before falling back to earth. Not that I would notice any more sand and dust on the more arid southern end of the Kimberley -De Aar line. But with very wide horizons the initially very distant atmospheric changes it would cause could sometimes be seen a day or so before the strong easterly wind that had picked the dust up arrived, giving a variety of dawn colours and then a day or so of a sort of overcast the sun never fully got through as the dust passed over. It would likely fall to ground when the wind eased.

Bryan

 

A number of tourist bosses met with UK weather chiefs recently. Apparently an app will display a rain symbol for the day, even if it is only forecast to rain for 10 minutes. Tourist attractions reckon people have been put off visiting due to forecast wet weather, even when 98% of the day is dry and sunny.

Weather apps unfortunately don't work in this country, our climate (ignoring the last few weeks!) is far too variable. Computer models designed for a continental climate struggle with the vaguries created by being an island, surrounded by sea water of variable temperatures and under the influence of a mild gulf stream. It is why snow can be so tricky to forecast here.
Its why I find meteorology so interesting in the UK, its one of the few aspects of science where we genuinely still have a lot to learn and where mother nature generally is still a couple of steps ahead of 'experts'!

 

The same complaints about the BBC weather forecasts were made when they first changed to using from using the Met Office. I have never understood why they did not address.

The weather patterns though have looked as if they have changed and there will be rain for most over the next 10 days or so. If there was not though and steam bans remained in place due to the conditions then whilst I understand the desire to avoid the loss from having to cancel a gala, I struggle with the suggestion that a steam gala should go ahead if a ban on running with steam on the general day to day to day timetable was in place. I don't think it would look to the general public who have chosen to travel and support a railway whilst the ban was in place. A family day out on a preserved railway is not cheap and I don't think many, if any, discount fares when steam is not running. In the event a fire was started which required the emergency services to attend and insurers to get involved, I would be concerned about their reaction, let alone the negative press coverage.