WUWT reader Tony Brown writes:
BBC to fire the Met Office from supplying its forecasts and end its 92 year old relationship
The Met Office is close by me in Exeter. Its local forecasts are often hopeless and inaccurate and sometimes I feel they would get it right more often if they looked out of their window instead of at their computer screens.
However, British weather is notoriously fickle and difficult to predict. The competitors are a NZ group (!!!) and Meteo, which seem a poor alternative. I have no knowledge of the former but Meteo I have found very unreliable when using them on the Continent.
WUWT reader Fretslider writes:
The Met Office has lost its lucrative weather forecasting contract with the BBC after nearly a century of providing the service. Negotiations to renew the deal hit a dead end and a new firm is expected to take over next year.
The BBC said it was legally required to open up the contract to outside competition and secure the best value for money for licence fee payers.
Dutch and New Zealand firms are said to be in the running for the contract, which is believed to make up a sizeable share of the £32.5 million a year the Met Office receives from commercial organisations, according to the Mail on Sunday.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3207392/Met-Office-fury-BBC-gives-contract-worth-millions-foreigners.html
My viewpoint is that this is much like the DirecTV and The Weather Channel skirmish. DirecTV and TWC failed to reach a price in negotiations, and TWC kept holding out for more, so DirecTV said “adios” and actually took them off the channel lineup, then about a month later, after TWC made all sort of noise rallying public support, DirectTV brought them back, at a reportedly much lower compensation rate.
I think this may be a lot like that, but given the demonstrated lack of predictive skill then hiding their bad forecast by the Met Office, plus their famously failed “BBQ summer”, I think they’ll have a fair amount of trouble rallying public support.
Josh also has something to say about it.
UPDATE:
Dr. Richard Tol adds in comments:
This has nothing to do with the quality of the Met Office forecasts. By law, the BBC has to put this contract out for tender. The Met Office’ offer was not competitive. The BBC cannot go back on this decision as the remaining competitors would sue them.
I think it has at least something to do with forecast accuracy, since the BBC didn’t want to pay what the Met Office was asking. If the value was worth it, why wouldn’t they pay it? By putting it to tender, BBC basically said “we don’t think your forecasting is worth your ask”, so take your chances with bidding.
Do they still have the Fastnet race?
indeed they do. We sometimes sail the old tub down there for a bit of a jolly 😉 http://www.rolexfastnetrace.com/
I don’t watch TV at home in the US but I watched some BBC news while traveling in Europe. They are more antisemitic than Al-Jazeera and more socialist than the now-defunct Soviet TV. I wanted to trow up.
Shame on you, Brits.
It’s not something the “people” have much control over!
When will the UK citizens demand the end of the TV license fees that prop up the BBC? Even if they never watch the beeb, they still are forced to pay for it.
Probably better than any computer model;
https://www.google.com.au/search?q=weather+predicting+rock&biw=1366&bih=661&tbm=isch&imgil=7t1KQEr0FSP6SM%253A%253BXtNm-MXejzxzyM%253Bhttp%25253A%25252F%25252Fwww.amazon.co.uk%25252FOriginal-Personalised-Weather-Forecasting-Stone%25252Fdp%25252FB004FM4ELK&source=iu&pf=m&fir=7t1KQEr0FSP6SM%253A%252CXtNm-MXejzxzyM%252C_&usg=__SWi2pAZ3QljFOxA785usBsbVDH0%3D&ved=0CCsQyjdqFQoTCLuG0umHwccCFccapgodzXcP_g&ei=lLXaVbvsK8e1mAXN773wDw#imgrc=gSzFFUAG5_rixM%3A&usg=__SWi2pAZ3QljFOxA785usBsbVDH0%3D
Friends, I think this is better news than you may realize. I suspect we’re seeing the BBC starting to back away from the AGW/Climate Change orthodoxy. This is just one step, but it’s a big one. They want to be able to say, “It weren’t us! We just reported what them buggers at Met told us! When there weren’t no warming like they promised, we fired ’em. See how responsible we are!”
If I’m right, rejoice! Raise a glass abd
Sorry. That should be Raise a glass and shout Halleluja! (Bad spelling on that last word. I’ll check with The Guardian for correction.)
I’m the first to criticize the M.O. web forecasts, but the forecasts on the BBC are much better.
The M.O. aren’t perfect, but who would do better? Who else could provide the same data from nationwide observation stations.
I think this is a negotiating ploy. In an interview on the BBC news channel yesterday, Steve Noyes, M.O. Director of Operations said, “The dialogue is still open, I’m very confident we will have a good outcome”.
I’m sure the decision was made using an impartial unbiased assessment of the data – in fact an almost identical procedure to that used by the Met Office when compiling it own global temperature figures!
But the biggest irony is this: the one group of people who might have spoken up for the Met office are those weather nerds who are most keen on British Science and engineering: climate sceptics!
I think the fault lies more at the BBC than the Met office.
They want to peddle dumbed-down soundbites and strip out all of the caveats and uncertainties from every prediction.
So the “Barbeque Summer” evolved from a longer term forecast with a known less than 30% accuracy to “fact” via a bit of abbreviation and cherry-picking.
Perhaps the Met needs to man up a bit and insist on its caveats being heard.
Perhaps also the BBC needs to have its funding cut and lose some of the photogenic airheads and get a few more Paxmans on board.
Authority is the missing component in both camps.
In 2015 new regulations came into force:
https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/356494/Draft_Public_Contracts_Regulations_2015.pdf
All gov organisations have to follow them. EU regulation, of which the above is part-and-parcel, also call for service provision above a certain value to HAVE to be put to tender. Not “if it suits us”…they are required BY LAW to put the service/s to tender.
Loads of money to be extracted in court cases…..
This is a non-story. The BBC are doing what every other publicly funded agency has to do – look for value for money. The BBC is having to do a lot of soul searching at the moment. They are a largely outdated institution that needs to reinvent itself. For them it’d have actually been much easier to just stick with the status quo. Giving contracts to foreign companies plays into the hands of their opponents.
Personally, I don’t object to the Met Office (I’m a Brit living in Britain), and I find their forecasts pretty reasonable most of the time. I do object to the fact that the Met Office have a direct input into the nonsense spouted by the IPCC and are happy to propagate CAGW scare-casts whenever we have a vaguely hot or unusually cold day in the UK. The Met Office effectively climbed into bed with the corrosive BBC mindset regarding CAGW and has been happy to play its masters’ tune all these years (even if the actual data might suggest something quite the opposite).
If the Met Office could just get back to actually doing the weather, and doing that reasonably well, without any of the subliminal pro-CAGW b*llox I’d be happy enough for them to continue serving the nation via the state broadcaster – but, then, the greater problem is actually the BBC itself. Until anybody even begins to sort that mess out, the Met Office might just have to suffer its fate.
This is quite a good write up on the Met Office, from the Daily Mail:
Entitled: “I bet the Met Office didn’t see this storm coming either!”, referring to the 1987 UK hurricane.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3208345/QUENTIN-LETTS-bet-Met-Office-didn-t-storm-coming-either.html
I will defend Michael Fish referring to the storm in 1987 as is was NOT a hurricane. It was a violent extratropical cyclone with hurricane force winds, but not a hurricane or even a tropical storm. It did not originate from same location where they form and did not have an eye.
Here’s an example of the horrific state of weather forecasting.
On Thursday, the forecast for Friday in my zip code, 98277, was for rain much of the day totalling about .38 inches. Saturday was to be rainy with about .65 inches expected.
By Friday morning it was barely drizzling, and the forecast for THAT SAME DAY was for about .15 inches. And for ,75 on Saturday. It stopped raining within a few minutes and no further precipitation was seen on Friday. That’s a failed forecast just hours ahead.
For Saturday they’ve ramped it up to .84 inches. That’s a very heavy rain around these parts. Will be interesting to see how far off that will be.
Oh, all this was from the inappropriately named Accuweather.
At least they forecast the amount of rain, which allows actual numerical comparison.
The MO web forecasts simply forecast “heavy rain” or “light rain” etc, without specifying the amount.
Heavy rain can turn out to be torrential, or no rain at all.
In their own accuracy calculations the MO only appear to measure whether or not it’s raining at all, and that includes anything from drizzle to heavy rain.
As the MO say: “It is difficult to forecast rainfall at a pinpoint location, therefore the target for this element is not as high as for others. For example, one location may have rain and a location a mile away may remain dry.”
My argument would be, if they can’t forecast accurately for a location, the should stop pretending that they can, and pretending that it’s accurate,
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/about-us/who/accuracy/forecasts
Re: pinpoint forecast. I live in a fairly rural area, my zip code doesn’t cover a lot of area. So I’d expect to see some of the rain they forecast, if it had rained.
Well, today was another rain bust. It was raining lightly early in the morning, when I got up at 7am., it stopped within 30 minutes. By 9am it was clear for several miles around, and didn’t rain again all day as far as I could tell. A far cry from .80+ inches. they also underestimated the wind. Was supposed to be gusts in the 30mph range, measured gusts were in the 60mph range. Power was out for hours (but my generator soldiered on).
IMHO, they only reason they’d get a forecast right, is via the broken clock syndrome.
Here today the MO web forecast had no rain until 16:00, only cloud.
However it rained just after 09;00.
A better forecast (based on the telly) would have been light rain showers all day, but that implies some sun, (apparently there is no symbol for cloudy with showers) but apparently the automatic algorithm they use to produce the web forecast couldn’t cope with that.
That’s my point really, by trying to produce automatic forecasts for every location, on an hourly basis, they are setting themselves up to fail.
It rained for an hour, yielding 1.2mm when it was forecast to be overcast.
Some would say that was “nearly” correct, but I would say it was 100% incorrect.
OTH light rain is forecast from 16:00 to 18:00, so if it doesn’t rain that’s another 100% failure.
Some would say the forecast was correct because it rained some time during the day, but that’s not what they forecast.
Also they forecasted wind of 14mph and it’s only been around 5 mph.
As it happened it did start raining about 16:00 as forecast by the MO but continued until 20:00, twice as long as forecasted. Also I would say it was heavier than the “light rain” the MO predicted, but as they don’t put numbers on the rainfall, I can’t say for sure.
Also the wind continued to be much lower than forecasted.
On a recent hiking trip in the UK for 5 weeks, I frequently had to consult the Met Office forecasts as the weather was a crucial concern for me. No they weren’t 100% accurate, but their forecasts were very useful and 90% accurate from my experience. It allowed me to make certain choices which turned out to be very good ones. I just cannot understand how people can claim that “they always get it wrong” (or something equally ignorant and conveniently broad) when everyday experiences from myself and others I know say otherwise. In fact these days, I can usually judge a person’s IQ by whether or not they make such a statement; those who say that various meteorological agencies “always get it wrong” are 90% of the time ignorant people with little education. And frankly, anyone making such statements on a website like this is doing the anti-AGW movement NO FAVOURS at all.
Have you actually compared the forecasts with observations?
If you compare the hourly forecast symbols of the web forecasts, for the first 24 hours, with MO observations, over a long enough period, you will find the accuracy is about 30-40%.
The problem is finding an observation site for your location.
As they don’t have sites for all locations for which they provide forecasts, nobody knows how accurate they really are.
You need to find the nearest observation site to where you are, and use the forecast for that.