Snow joke: can UK weather be accurately predicted?
Last week, much of the UK ground to something of a standstill. Commuters missed work, schools were closed, public transport was withdrawn, and London town was pretty much boarded up like an old abandoned mine.
A couple of inches of snow received blanket coverage across the media, and people were sternly advised not to venture outdoors for the foreseeable future lest they end up like poor old Captain Oates at the South Pole. This despite the fact that only a fraction of the country had actually seen any snow. Indeed, by the following morning, the streets of London themselves had endured nothing much more than a thaw and some drizzle, and the place was notably clear of both snow and put-off commuters. It wasn’t so much the snow that brought London to a standstill – it was the weather forecast.
Up here in Newcastle upon Tyne we avoided the bad weather – until yesterday. As I crawled my car through a white-out blizzard along snow-bound and ungritted roads, past abandoned cars and the odd bus parked in someone’s front garden, BBC 5Live’s weather forecast told me it was bright and dry. (By yesterday evening the Met Office was offering a severe weather warning for heavy snow across the North East of England for the following morning. In reality, today Mother Nature has given us only beautiful clear blue skies.) Aside from the obvious question of London bias, I wondered why we bother listening to weather forecasts at all.
By the forecasters’ own admission, weather forecasting as a best-guess scenario. They look at what the weather is like now, and extrapolate what might happen next. Our island location makes UK weather especially unpredictable and forecasting particularly difficult.
It is possible to accurately predict the UK’s weather some of the time. If I said that the weather on any given day was going to be quite cold with a chance of rain, I’d be right more often than I was wrong. But that would be of little use to people who need to know about blizzards or hurricanes. As Patrick Young said, ‘The trouble with weather forecasting is that it’s right too often for us to ignore it and wrong too often for us to rely on it.’
It wasn’t too long ago that the BBC included horoscopes in its breakfast news programme. Was Russell Grant’s star-gazing any more fanciful than Peter Gibbs’s bold-as-brass attempts to convince us he can predict the future?
Even some of the weather presenters seem to have given up on the whole charade. Sky News weatherman Francis Wilson – a former BBC Breakfast Time colleague of Russell Grant – has for several years worn the shattered look of a man who has realised that perhaps he did not peruse the full length of the selection counter before plumping for his chosen career.
So how accurate is the weather forecast? The Met Office asseses its own performance, and says it achieved its targets in 2008, for example predicting maximum temperature 85.5 percent of the time. But predicting maximum temperature is perhaps not quite the same as predicting blizzards and hurricanes.
Can anything that hasn’t happened yet be accurately predicted? Or should we just file weather forecasting alongside astrology, numerology and the witterings of Nostrodamus?
Personally, I won’t be happy until George Alagiah ends every BBC News bulletin with the words, ‘And now to find out what’s happening with the weather… why not crane your lazy neck and have a look out of the window? Goodnight.’
