What do you think?
The Met office has been letting me down big time recently.
It seems every time I plan for a big riding day based on a good forecast the weather turns out to be a shocker.
Which do you guys think is the most reliable and useful?

yr.no seems quite reliable

you need to bear in mind though that anything over 48 hours is always going to have some error in it, sometimes quite a lot
It’s the nature of where we are in the world

Or am I just being too soft.
Do you guys enjoy going out riding in this shit?
To put things into perspective I’m an Aussie and this kind of weather does my head in!

Met Office. Use the data (Rainfall radar in particular) to get an exact forcast for your location.

And remember that over 48hrs, nothing will be terribly accurate!

Given the Met Office has the widest network of information gathering for weather in the UK, they are as good if not better than anyone else. The ‘over 48hrs’ as mentioned above seems to hold true.

To put things into perspective I’m an Aussie and this kind of weather does my head in!

I wasn’t keen on the flies crawling all over me in Oz, either…. 😉

xcweather.co.uk all the way, very accurate wind speed and direction, popular with boat and fishy people

who does the BBC use now?

another user of XC Weather.

I’m afraid you just have to accept it if you want to get out. I do slalom waterskiing & rock climbing which are both very weather dependant. So, MTBing to me, is the one sport I can do and not really care much what the weather is going to be.

The only weather forecasts I use are Metoffice local forecast, Metoffice mountain forecast and MWIS.

I find the met office website terrible to use, but their iPhone app on the other hand is great.

The only reliable weather is the forcast the day or 2 before imo, and in that they are all much of a muchness to be honest.

personally i prefer to look at the bbc satelitte view and move it back and forward to get the gist of how the rain is moving.

Metcheck has always been pretty accurate.

What do the french ski resorts use? I’ve found there snow forecasts spot on it the past.

MWIS and raintoday.co.uk for me.

Metcheck seems to have been awful lately

I like this: http://passageweather.com

TooTall – Member
Given the Met Office has the widest network of information gathering for weather in the UK, they are as good if not better than anyone else. The ‘over 48hrs’ as mentioned above seems to hold true

Yep the vast majority of uk weather sites use METoffice data, it’s just interpretation and working on different confidence intervals.

I like yr.no – nice interface to look at with lots of info on amount of rain, wind speed & direction etc

http://www.accuweather.com

I generally find this to be very reliable, although the “48hr” caveat still applies. Gives a pretty reliable hour-by-hour forecast too.

BBC seems to be very good at telling you what the weathers doing right now (but I can see that out of the window), but pretty pants at providing a reliable forecast.

i use http://www.xcweather.co.uk/ a lot, it’s great for road cycling (i usually want to go out into the wind..)
combined with the bbc’s rainfall map thing which is not bad for short term (next few hours), and looking out of the window (top floor on a hill..)

Hugor, I too have noticed in the last couple of weeks or so the forecasts have kept changing quickly, promising ‘sun tomorrow’ but then by the next morning it’s changed to heavy rain all day! I think we’re just going through a period of particularly unpredictable weather, which doesn’t fit into the computer models that the Met Office and others are using.

Overall the Met Office and the BBC are pretty reliable. I particularly like the map at the bottom of the BBC 24 hr or 5 day forecast for your town, which shows the rain passing through, so you can make a good guess of when its going to rain on you.

metcheck got crap after the whole ‘MD convicted of raping a child’ thing.

I use yr.no now, it has pretty graphs 🙂

Dave

http://www.raintoday.co.uk is pretty good to see the showers on the way

Metcheck has always been pretty accurate

What, MetGUESS, the worst weather forcasting site in THE WORLD that gives hourly forecasts 3 weeks in advance (Impossible to predict) that change every time you look at them?????

Ohh, you make me larrrf!!!

@hugor…. I think it’s simply the nature of English weather that you’re experiencing. The British Isles has very fast-moving, changeable weather compared to Auz, where I live most of the year (California), and many other parts of the world. It’s why Brits talk about the weather so much.

As others have said, forget about any reliability for a forecast more than 48 hours out. You might get lucky, but most often not.

What, MetGUESS, the worst weather forcasting site in THE WORLD that gives hourly forecasts 3 weeks in advance (Impossible to predict) that change every time you look at them?????

Ohh, you make me larrrf!!!
+1 I wouldn’t give them the time of day, bunch of Jokers, cads, bounders and charlatans.

What’s good for you depends entirely upon how much you are willing to interpret from basic charts.

If you take your forecast from those silly little single symbol thing (sun/rain etc) then be prepared to be disappointed because it’s impossible to summarize things that way and I’m sure meteorological offices are exasperated having to continually dumb things down to the lowest common denominator.

Personally I am amazed just how brilliantly accurate synoptic chart predictions can be, sometimes up to a week in advance. The improvement over the last 20 years has been massive.

+1 I wouldn’t give them the time of day, bunch of Jokers, cads, bounders and charlatans.

don’t forget ‘rapists’

http://www.westwind.ch/?link=ukmb,http://www2.wetter3.de/Fax/,.gif,bracknell+00,bracknell+24,bracknell+36,bracknell+48,bracknell+60,bracknell+72,bracknell+84,bracknell+96,bracknell+120

With raintoday, am I right in thinking you have to pay to ‘look into the future’?

Round my way Metcheck were forecasting 275mph winds gusting to 330mph!!

Round my way Metcheck were forecasting 275mph winds gusting to 330mph!!

So you live on Jupiter then?

who does the BBC use now?

A combination of a tombola, dart board and pulling bits of paper with weather types written on them out of a hat.