"NOBODY likes to be ridiculed, but for some people it can become a
matter of life and death. Take Robert FitzRoy, the founding father of
the UK's Meteorological Office and captain of the Beagle during Charles
Darwin's five-year voyage. A keen amateur forecaster, he
enthusiastically applied the science of his day to weather prediction.
Much good did it do him. Instead of hailing his tentative
prognostications as a useful first step, politicians, newspapers and
other scientists harangued and mocked FitzRoy whenever he got it wrong.
Depression quickly set in, to fatal effect. One Sunday morning in 1865,
FitzRoy cut his throat in despair… "
We've all said some not very nice things about weather forecasters in the past. My friends and family know how miffed I can get when the forecast is wrong, or so vague as to be useless. One of the big problems is that they simply don’t give us enough information. So, while they’re never wrong, they’re also useless. But I’ve had a revelation. The BBC weather site now gives me enough information. I’ll try not to be rude about weather forecasting again.
One of the big problems has always been the heinous over-simplification. To sum up a day’s weather in terms of a picture of the sun part-obscured by a fluffy cloud is (in Britain at least) ridiculous. We have moments when the sky looks like that, followed by hours when it’s cloaked in grey clouds. Followed by rain, then bright sun. It’s weather, you see: it changes.
The Met Office knows this, of course, It knows that a better (I mean more useful) way to forecast is to say “X% chance of showers”. But, apparently, this gets misinterpreted. A decade or so ago, a study showed that the general public viewed people giving a probabilistic forecast as incompetent, ignorant or even lazy. A forecaster’s “50 per cent chance of rain”, for instance, gets misinterpreted as if it were a simple 50-50; in other words: "I don't know what the hell is going to happen tomorrow."
Thank the (cloudy) heavens, then, for the BBC’s new dynamic whizzy satellite/computer model view of the weather. It’s available online. Ignore the simpleton-targeted info at the top, and scroll down to the picture of your area (sorry if it doesn’t cover you – feel free to look at my weather, centred on Newhaven, England).
I can scroll through the day and say – as I did today – well, it’s gonna rain here this morning, but it’ll clear by lunchtime, and then remain sunny (with a couple of cloudy intervals) all afternoon.
And do you know what? That’s exactly what happened! Now everyone can be a weather forecaster. All you need to know is that the dark patches are clouds, the blue patches are rain, and the slightly sunnier colour means it’ll be sunny.
Was this information really so difficult to share? Had I had it before, I wouldn’t have been led to write this article for New Scientist (I think it’s subscription only), which got me into some quite unexpected hot water.
The interesting question now is, have they let the cat out of the bag? Is forecasting for any particular area quite easy, really, given the computer models? And if so, why has it been so poor for so long?
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