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Comment by binarymax | Hacker News Reader

I've lived in the UK for the past 8 years now (having lived in various places in the East Coast USA for the rest of my life).

I learned quickly that English weather forecasts are useless past the current day. It is probably due to the geographical location. East Coast US was accurate to 3 to 5 days. I just use Dark Sky[0] to get weather for the next several hours, which is mostly accurate.

Given the situation with the contract I see lots of back and forth noting accuracy - but Met Office does just as good a job as anyone else, for probably a much higher fee.

[0] http://forecast.io

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> East Coast US was accurate to 3 to 5 days

Interestingly in the US, the East Coast forecast is more accurate than the West Coast.

This is because the trade winds in the US mostly move West to East, so most of the Weather moves in that direction as well.

There are more weather sensors on land then in the Sea, so there is more data available to make a forecast with.

And, up until the last year or so, there were parts of the west coast (basically, off the olympic peninsula) that didn't have any offshore radar coverage. So there were certain classes of dangerous storms that could sneak up and whack Seattle. (One of the storms that did in a floating bridge did this, basically, no one knew that there was a hurricane force storm until it hit the coast, and from then, it was an hour to Seattle)

I would be interested to see a global heatmap of weather predictability.

As a life-long east coaster, I never understood the frequent grouses one hears about weather reports being inaccurate. I consider them to be quite good given how much inherent chaos is in the system they're trying to predict.

It's not just about the number of sensors. The clouds form over the sea. Predicting when and where those clouds will form is much harder than predicting when and where those clouds will move.

Clouds form over land too.

When warm wet air meets cool air you get clouds. The goal is being able to measure the humidity and temperature of those colliding air masses.

One needs to account for relative humidity, which the ocean provides. Much of the US landmass between the pacific crestline and the rocky mountains is arid desert (from the canadian border to mexico). Second, there exist ocean-specific dynamics like el-nino, which don't really have an overland anolog.

> This is because the [westerlies] [...] move West to East

FTFY

Agreed, many dynamics as far as UK weather concerned and probably the hardest country/area to do a forecast due to those dynamics.

Indeed even the Guardian reports this http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/sep/03/uk-weather-defies-...

It's probably worth noting that Forecast.io and Dark Sky use the Met Office's radar, prediction system, and severe weather warning system (in conjunction with other data sources) to create their forecasts.

Just yesterday I was at a garden party where they predicted rain from 11am to 8pm, BBC predicted it would stop at 3pm, and that's what happened. Very nice web app, but in my experience Forecast.io's predictions aren't very good.

Yup - you are somewhere on a fairly narrow island with warm water flowing South to North and a cold wind at high altitude blowing West to East (or is it East to West? I always get that mixed up).

It is going to be slightly changeable.

I'm assuming the Met will still bid for the contract, and we shall see who gets it. Pity them the first time they get it badly wrong!

The met has bid for the contract, and lost the bid. The BBC and the met have both independantly confirmed tha. The met office isn't going to be providing weather data to the BBC.

Some of the staff (the presenters tended to be real meteorologists workig for the met office) might transfer over; severe weather stuff is still going to come from the met office; the Shipping Forecast is not a met office thing so should be unaffected.

> the Shipping Forecast is not a met office thing

Isn't it? It always starts with 'And now the shipping forecast issued by the Met Office, on behalf of the Maritime and Coastguard Agency, at...'

Ah, yes. Sorry.

The met office provide the data to the Maritime and Coastguard agency, who then provide that to the BBC. The presenters are BBC staff, not Met Office staff. So there's no change to the Shipping Forecast.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/1181929...

I stand corrected, thanks.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/bbc/11819164/Met-Office-lost...

Can this really be about an app and about including probability statements? Good heavens.

> The met has bid for the contract, and lost the bid. The BBC and the met have both independantly confirmed tha.

Where does it say this, please? All the articles I have found say that the contract will be put out to tender, but none actually say that the Met Office will be prevented from bidding.

http://blog.metoffice.gov.uk/2015/08/23/met-office-in-the-ne...

> You may have seen reports in the media today that the Met Office won’t be the BBCs main weather provider when the current contract ends.

> Obviously everyone at the Met Office is disappointed that we won’t be supplying weather presenters and graphics to the BBC in the future.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-34031785

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/aug/23/met-office-lo...

Someone from the Met Office was on a bunch of Radio Four news programmes (probably Today, World at One, PM) saying that they've lost the contract.

That's fine, but where has anyone said that the Met Office can't bid in the upcoming tender? The Met Office blog post that you linked (thanks, I hadn't seen that) implies that they will no longer be providing services, but is this because they will decline to bid or because they are not permitted to bid?

I've found that Weather Underground[0] seems to be more accurate than most - not sure if this is actually the case or it's just a perception thing though (I believe they "crowd-source" the sensors somewhat, in that people can install relevant hardware and software at home to provide meteorological data, and also the app asks for feedback if the current weather data is correct or not)! I trust it enough to decide whether to bring a coat or not for that day - as others have mentioned, I had no idea the relative accuracy of forecasts in the UK is lower than elsewhere, interesting!

[0] http://www.wunderground.com/

My old boss was a South African expat who had also lived in the UK for a little while. Her comment on the two weather services: In the UK, they'll predict it will rain tomorrow at 3pm for 15 minutes, and it does. Whereas in Capetown, you can actually physically see the storm approaching over the sea, and they'll still be forecasting fine weather...

I've lived in the UK my whole life and was not even aware forecasts could be reliably accurate so far in advance!

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