How awful are the weathermen/women!!!!!!!!!!!!

[yelsac]

Well

I live on the Isle of Wight & after looking at various weather reports last night I thought lets have a go at the meteors. They all said beautifully clear sky's great for looking up!

Well it was until 11.30pm when bags & bags of cloud/mist/fog came in GGGrrrrrrr!

I spent a couple of hours just about viewing faint stars through the mist & saw a grand total of "wait for it" one shooting star wooooow!

How rubbish are they at giving us the weather? if I was as bad at my job I'd get the sack, absolutely useless!

OK rant over, on the bright side managed to see (before the clouds rolled in) the famous double double near Lyra which was great.

[badgerchap]

I'm afraid the Weather soothsayers were kinder to me. Bang on report, 46 Perseids. Sorry! Maybe you'll have better luck tonight?

Typed inexpertly from my phone

[bejay1957]

Well

I live on the Isle of Wight & after looking at various weather reports last night I thought lets have a go at the meteors. They all said beautifully clear sky's great for looking up!

Well it was until 11.30pm when bags & bags of cloud/mist/fog came in GGGrrrrrrr!

I spent a couple of hours just about viewing faint stars through the mist & saw a grand total of "wait for it" one shooting star wooooow!

How rubbish are they at giving us the weather? if I was as bad at my job I'd get the sack, absolutely useless!

OK rant over, on the bright side managed to see (before the clouds rolled in) the famous double double near Lyra which was great.

Understandable rant, but the weather presenters do not control the weather, only predict it with varying success/failure...

[leelee970]

A little cloud was over Salisbury area, but not very bad. Managed to see about 25 in an hour between 22.30 - 23.30.

[yelsac]

Understandable rant, but the weather presenters do not control the weather, only predict it with varying success/failure...

I know its all guess work but they get it wrong more times than right believe me!

My job completely relies on the stinking weather, my wife tells me I'm silly to have a hobby that is dependent on the weather too, ahh well never mind

[LukeSkywatcher]

They were spot on again here for last night. They said cloud and we had cloud.

[AlexB67]

It is much easier to criticise, but much harder to do. There is a met office not far away from me and years ago visited there a few times, they have some very talented people, jobs like that are not for the faint hearted I can assure you.

Even if lot of theory is actually understood, it is just not practical in terms of computing power to solve such a problem with a great deal of reliability. Weather systems exhibit all sorts of behaviour patterns; To put in the math speak, it is, or can be a very non-linear problem exhibiting chaotic behaviour as well as more predictable patterns. There are known reasons why sometimes it works, why sometimes it doesn't. All in all, it is hard enough to solve problems for much smaller system exhibiting similar characteristics. In a nutshell, a weather system is huge and an object of many variables.

The other night I was sitting out in the garden. I could see cloud formation in the space of 5 minutes, the sky went from completely clear to cloud covered in that time. To predict something like that for a small localised area, which in turn is something embedded in a much larger system that affects it, it not easy to do.

They are making progress though, but just accept it for what it is. It is not going to change anytime soon, or perhaps move to the desert, the weather predictions work quite well for such areas

[AndyWB]

Forecast was bang on for me here in Reading, home of the European Centre for Medium Range Forecasting. Coincidence?

[nytecam]

The best way to check for cloudcover is to do it yourself eg go to Meteorsat website and note cloud movement over a day for your site - use both IR and visible for your forcast ! :-/

[yelsac]

The best way to check for cloudcover is to do it yourself eg go to Meteorsat website and note cloud movement over a day for your site - use both IR and visible for your forcast ! :-/

Hi thanks for the info

what is that website called?

I put in Meteorsat into my browser all it responded with was something called Meteosat which was in spanish!

sorry I'm a bit thick

[Paul M]

Although all the BBC weather presenters are professional meteorologist they don't come up through the ranks like they used to!

Most go straight into tv forecast presentation and are strongly guided by the senior forecaster. Most of what they add personally is by way of presentation style only. They are primarily presenters not forecasters.

Back in the day they'd have worked their way up through the Met O or military out in the field. Hands on observations and chart drawing and that kind of thing.

They don't make weather men like they used to but at least the weather ladies are easy on the eye

[yelsac]

Although all the BBC weather presenters are professional meteorologist they don't come up through the ranks like they used to!

Most go straight into tv forecast presentation and are strongly guided by the senior forecaster. Most of what they add personally is by way of presentation style only. They are primarily presenters not forecasters.

Back in the day they'd have worked their way up through the Met O or military out in the field. Hands on observations and chart drawing and that kind of thing.

They don't make weather men like they used to but at least the weather ladies are easy on the eye

Yes you do have a point there, some of the ladies are very easy on the eye!!

makes the forecast bearable.

[Andy_E]

You know it's quite interesting reading these threads as there seems to be patterns forming where certain areas regularly receive (fairly) accurate weather reports and others seem to cause nothing but disappointment and woe. Over here in West Cheshire the night time weather reports run at around 10% accuracy... no exaggeration and based on looking back at observation reports for the past year or so. Could it perhaps be that some areas simply have more a more complex set of variables? For example, where I live most of the spring flowers tend to come out a good week before most places of a similar latitude (strangely I have family spread across the country in a straight line form coast to coast!). Of course, this is down to the micro climate of the area (and not quite the same thing I know) , but it would be interesting to see which areas seem to get more accurate overnight forecasts and why. Clear skies predicted here tonight by the way, so there's a 90% chance I'll be sat indoors with a glass of wine

[cotterless45]

Agreed, there's also the south east factor, where very forecast starts and finishes in the south east. The rest of us are living north of Watford in Bung Bunga land !

Mind you even the "Scope Nights" has let me down,Nick.

[nytecam]

It is much easier to criticise, but much harder to do. There is a met office not far away from me and years ago visited there a few times, they have some very talented people, jobs like that are not for the faint hearted I can assure you.

Well said - the usual punter's weather rant - this time about seamist living on the coast - well what a big surprise

ps: Didn't see any Perseid 'cos didn't try

[yelsac]

Well said - the usual punter's weather rant - this time about seamist living on the coast - well what a big surprise

ps: Didn't see any Perseid 'cos didn't try

Thanks for your input especially the sarcasm??????

I was simply stating how utterly frustrating it is to watch several different weather reports for no more than an hour's time in the future & they are totally wrong

& The fact that its a regular thing!

[wxsatuser]

Come on........the weather is changable......expect it to change.

[wxsatuser]

The best way to check for cloudcover is to do it yourself eg go to Meteorsat website and note cloud movement over a day for your site - use both IR and visible for your forcast ! :-/

Better than that......get a EUMETCAST system and see it first hand, High resolution every 15minutes.

Plus NOAA and METOP polar high res as well.

It's not that expensive if you can donate one fast pc to it or two medium fast pc's

EUMETSAT are are great friendly bunch, customer service is excellent.

We can now register direct and don't have to go thru the Metoffice anymore.

Here is a Channel 1 full disk, reduce from over 3000pixels to 800, they are huge originally.

The 1km stuff is even bigger and very easy to see the cloud patterns over the UK.

[ronin]

How awful, well not too bad here, Alex Dolen looks fine.

Forecast can leave a bit to be desired. Today apparently the rain moved off about 4:00am, shame then that it was so heavy it woke me up a 6:45am.

The animated map around 9:00am showed all the rain way off South around Kent and France while the downpour twice here gave the impression that maybe they were a bit optimistic in where it had moved to. They even said that East would now be getting clear skies and sun, it was so dark I had the light on to see things by.

[ChrisG3484]

Have you checked the weather forcast that Mark Thomson does on his website or something like Astro panel?

[Paul M]

Better than that......get a EUMETCAST system and see it first hand, High resolution every 15minutes.

I used to receive polar orbiter imagery on my old BBC micro then an Amiga 1200.

HRPT and Meteosat equipment was just too expensive 20 years ago and the Internet hadn't really got going.

I was a member of The Remote Imaging Group (RIG) for some years.

The proliferation of pager transmissions on frequencies adjacent to the VHF wxsat band eventually made it almost impossible to get clear imagery due to interference.

Sent from my ZT ICS using Tapatalk 4

[wxsatuser]

Hi Paul.

I was a member of RIG a few years back.

Went over to GEO when things went pear shaped.

I did VHF with a Timestep set-up but moved up to HRPT, that was expensive.

System worked nonstop for near on 6years then the Timestep rx went up the

swannee and I packed it in.

I used to enjoy chasing the OKEAN sats but pagers and local crud used to mess with the signal.

About the time my HRPT packed up the EUMETCAST came along and been doing that ever since.

EUMETCAST has everything in one box, just amazing what data is available now.

Normally have it ticking over with David Taylor's Data manager recieving just the MSG data.

I used to take most of the data but no time to look at it all, so MSG does me fine now.

Back into astronomy now so the MSG stuff comes in handy for cloud spotting.

Cheers Mike

[jetstream]

Years ago we seemed to have more predictable weather forecasts.Back then there were weather "stations" all over the country and they communicated the observations "real time".Now with all the satellite stuff and everything else,the stations are mostly shut down.The modern weather forecasts are useful,but sometimes-OK here mostly-let us down.For instance the other night my buddy called 15 miles away & said HERE SHE COMES!!So I ran outside to tie down the trampoline just as a big storm cell hit,the cells are very common here at this time of year.Too bad the Gov't won't pay for both the old weather stations and the new technology.