The BBC and the weather forecast

jgsi

Sunday plan is to do a reliability run in Shropshire.
It means organising the car , the early start and picking up a club mate.
Last nights forecast was a triumph of "we have snow on Sunday just for you". bang in the middle of Shropshire it looked like as well. Why do they have to sound so smug..?
Do I believe this anyway?.. as the BBC website does not herald snow for Sunday... just grey cloud..
Just never any consistency... most of the time they only predict what has actually happened in the previous 12 hours

Weather Channel .. its light rain....

briantrumpet

... and though out of all of them I find the Met Office website the most reliable, I do get annoyed when the maps and words say completely different things. On the whole, if one of them is going to be wrong, it's the maps. But overall, most of the time, it's amazing how much they do get right.

Bobbinogs

The BBC get all their data from the Met office and it is then down to personal interpretation of what one individual believes might happen, and the data can vary between reports anyway as the weather changes. I don't think it will ever be an exact science and I only use forecasts for a view of what is likely.

The Met office site is very good, e.g., Cirencester, and there is also an up to date table of the actual weather. I have been looking forward to my first audax of the year this Sunday but the forecast is 0 deg overnight and then a max of 3 deg, so big chance of frost/ice (and I need to be cycling on my way to the start by 07:30) so might have to bin the whole thing rather than risk a spill. Still, plenty more riding days left in the year (I did a lovely 75 miles in the Welsh mountains yesterday...got sunshine, wind, sleet, hail, torrential downpour of rain and then finally light snow...bloody fantastic ).

Rouge Penguin

Another one for the Met Office. Find the Beeb a bit hit and miss on the website

alihisgreat

+1 met office website -> they seem to get the timing for rain spot on!

ToeKnee

The BBC are terrible - their information tends to be behind (time wise) that on other sites, and they can rarely get the current weather right.

I use MetCheck (http://www.metcheck.com/V40/UK/FREE/tod ... ipcode=ec2) and find their presentation very useful. The only down side is that it is broken sometimes.

I saw WindFinder (http://www.windfinder.com/forecast/london_city&wf_cmp=7) posted somwhere - on here?

OptimisticBiker talks about using a 'weather radar'.

What links are people using to monitor the weather?

2Phat4Rapha

I think it quite likely that the original BBC weather people were trained by my grandmother. She always had a piece of seaweed hanging outside her kitchen window so that if it got wet she knew it had been raining.

ddraver

Combination of metcheck and the Met office for me, something between the 2 is usually right

The Dutch have a great radar website (buienradar) which is outstanding, it has a radar image that moves in 10 min intervals and you really can say it will rain at 1220 and stop by 1230 so I ll wait 5 mins.

jgsi

ddraver wrote:

Combination of metcheck and the Met office for me, something between the 2 is usually right

The Dutch have a great radar website (buienradar) which is outstanding, it has a radar image that moves in 10 min intervals and you really can say it will rain at 1220 and stop by 1230 so I ll wait 5 mins.

But can they move it over Shrewsbury for Sunday tho'?

Gizmodo

ToeKnee wrote:

What links are people using to monitor the weather?

See my thread from last year in Road Beginners - http://www.bikeradar.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=40020&t=12799410

ToeKnee

Gizmodo wrote:

ToeKnee wrote:

What links are people using to monitor the weather?

See my thread from last year in Road Beginners - http://www.bikeradar.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=40020&t=12799410

Thanks.

rolf_f

There are weather forecasts worth reading and ones that aren't. The ones that are worth reading are based on Met Office - the ones that aren't worth reading are not Met Office.

It's an equivalent of chosing to fly out on your holidays in something the bloke down the road knocked up in his garage rather than an Airbus.

McBain_v1

@Rolf F

It's an equivalent of chosing to fly out on your holidays in something the bloke down the road knocked up in his garage rather than an Airbus.

Yeah, but isn't Airbus currently undertaking urgent safety checks on the A380 because it's developing loads of cracks? Perhaps a bloke in a garage would do a better job!

JamesB

If you`ve time, look at MetOffice beta site and the UK observations map---by looking at a zoom level to say W Mids / NW england scale you can track progress rain / current temps and wind; this can then be interpreted to a quite accurate look at what IS going to happen in next few hours for your location enjoy