Met office - wrong

[Moonhawk]

I know predicting the weather isn't an exact science - but why do the met office seem to get it consistently wrong.

For example - this is the current met office forecast for my area (i.e. no rain until ~4pm)



I just went outside however and it's raining.

I looked at both the met office live rainfall radar map and netweather live rainfall radar map and forecast and they show rain falling on my area right now. Netweather forecast rain all day - which looking at the rainfall radar I can well believe.



and



I can understand the met office not being able to predict isolated showers - but a huge slow moving swathe of rain like this must be easy to predict. The met office forecast doesn't even seem to be consistent with their own live rainfall data which shows it raining on my area - yet the forecast says no.

I looked at the live rainfall radar map before I went to bed last night and saw this huge band of rain sitting over Ireland. Just eyeballing the speed it was moving - I suspected it would hit us around 8am. Lo and behold.

I don't expect Back to the Future 2 levels of accuracy - but is 'broadly correct' and unreasonable expectation, especially since other sites seem to get it correct based off what is presumably the same data set.

Edited by Moonhawk on Sunday 3rd September 10:41

[Moonhawk]

Atomic12C said:

The other thing to bear in mind is that forecasts are usually done as a general area coverage and not as a very local area. To predict what will exactly happen in a small local area raises the complexity of the prediction to a different level, and therefore the probability of being correct much lower.

But I wasn't complaining that they hadn't predicted a sharp localised shower - the rainfall they failed to predict was a blanket that covered most of the north west and most of wales as shown on the rainfall radar screenshot I posted in the OP. It rained almost constantly from around 8am and was still drizzling even at 11pm.

[Moonhawk]

Gandahar said:

Unless you are having a wedding or judging on a life and death experience does it actually matter if right or wrong?

It matters to me at the moment because I have the roof off my house and it's only protected by a temporary scaffold, which is letting some water in.

An accurate forecast can mean the difference between me having to stay up all night on standby ready to start emptying buckets and moving tarps - compared to getting a decent night's sleep.