Met Office forecast for home today at 10am was dry with sunny spells and chance of a light shower later in the day. The 10am and 12 noon forecast for a 5% chance of rain and had sunny intervals symbols.

It had already started raining at 9am has rained constantly since for the subsequent 5 hours. Do they not have local weather stations or observers to feed them current data. A quick look out of the window could tell them their forecast is pants.

Given that the Met Office can’t even get the current weather correct can anyone recommend somewhere better to look?

I find the met office and BBC to be complete works of fiction.

XC Weather has been the most reliable

None that i’ve found

yr.no seems to be fairly reliable – at least for the few months I’ve been using it – and the meteogram is a really good way of presenting it IMO

http://www.yr.no/place/United_Kingdom/England/Hebden_Bridge/hour_by_hour.html

I understand that nearly all the weather websites get the raw data from the Met Office it all depends on how they interpret it.

I usually have a look at the satellite pictures and draw my own conclusions.

RainToday is a good place to start it may state the bleedin’ obvious but you soon become familiar with the weather patterns

yr.no for low
MWIS for high
magicseaweed for wet stuff

🙂

This one always forecasts decent weather.

I understand that nearly all the weather websites get the raw data from the Met Office it all depends on how they interpret it.

Prolly more likely to be the Nasa GFS data, then re-processed. But either way, most of if comes from the same source.

Tend to use the yr.no now – both website and Android app.

Paula Fisch !

Windguru .Find a location thats nearish to you .
Cross reference with XC weather and the met office.
Choose the forcast you like the sound of the most.

Is it a website that only forecasts decent weather that you are looking for?

I’ve used the WeatherPro app for several years now, and it’s pretty accurate most of the time. I’ve had accuracy to within minutes with rainfall, but there are obviously occasions when the forecast is not exact. Having satellite and precip radar in the app make a big difference, because you can see the weather approaching, with a timescale.

No, in short – there isn’t.

The most wretched of them all has to be Metcheck when you can get it to work – I’m convinced their meteorological kit is an old village summer fete tombola.

Same as peterfile. If going into the hills MWIS is pretty good.

Thanks folks I’ll check out those suggestions.

Is it a website that only forecasts decent weather that you are looking for?

That would be nice wouldn’t it.

another xcweather user here, wind forecast is very reliable, popular site with boaty types.

Depends what I’m doing and where:

Coastal = windguru.cz and magicseaweed. Windguru is normally pretty accurate for windspeeds etc. Magicseaweed is good for sea conditions. Don’t care if it rains as I’ll be wet anyway 🙂

Inland = MWIS for anyrthing north of Stirling. Metoffice app “seems” to have been quite reliable lately around East Lothian – mind you all it has said is “RAIN”

Normally I think the MetOffice does a pretty good job (particuarly the new version), and yes, like you say, most other websites are just reprocessing thier data (went to a very interesting talk by Julia Slingo – Met Office Chief Scientist last year about this and thier super computers etc), but yesterday they really did get it totally wrong in the NE, I agree neninja.

I tend to cross ref with WeatherPro and MWIS. I had a game with a mate who was using MetCheck, which was really wrong! It supposed to be sunny, the metoffice forecast rain and it lashed it down all day!

Metcheck used to be the best but since the owner got convicted and locked up its become a waste of time. My weather site of choice is now
http://www.yr.no/.

I go to wettzentrale.

You can see if it is:
high or low pressure (changeable or not)
roughly how windy (windy or not),
if low pressure it will be or was wet.

If you assume that tommorow’s weather will be the same as today’s. you’ll be right about 2 times out of 3.

I find the met office and BBC to be complete works of fiction.

The BBC is excellent, if you understand how it’s done and what the caveats are. For example, if you’ve got a front moving south it could say bring rain to a certain spot. Forecasters have to predict how fast it’ll be going and then consequently the timings of the rain. If they get it a few mph out it’ll mean the difference between some place getting rain or not. In terms of the overall weather, they are very accurate, but it just isn’t possible to predict to that level of accuracy in certain situations.

You could also have say and east-west rain band, which might sit 10 miles either side of where they predict. Again a very accurate prediction, but in terms of a particular town (as it sounds like in the OP’s case) it could be a long way out.

Incidentally today’s forecast in Cardiff was warm and sunny. It’s warm and sunny.

A bit of understanding really helps. I don’t pay much attention to the rain/sun icon they use for a particular day in a particular location. Different forecasters use quite different criteria to arrive at an icon. People seem to want a simple answer, but the answer isn’t really simple.

I listen to what the telly forecasters actually say, which is great for an overall picture and giving confidence levels, and I also look at the predicted charts.

Just tried that yr.no site. Like it.

Webcams showing the local condition are a good extra.

I think someone’s mentioned The Weather Outlook already.

Plus the radar on http://www.meteox.co.uk This has an option to zoom in on your own location to see where the rain is.

Like clubber said, the yr.no site has (IMO) the best visualisation of weather information, really like it. Accuracy of it? Still not too sure…

On the other hand, inAccuWeather has been so thoroughly wrong over the last few months that I’m finding it very useful to know what the weather is NOT going to be! 8)

If you assume that tommorow’s weather will be the same as today’s. you’ll be right about 2 times out of 3.

Called persistence. Like you say, you’ll be wrong 1 day in 3. Which isn’t that good. It certainly makes you less right than the met office -according to a friend who worked there, they get their bonuses based on how much better their forecasts are than persistence.

The reason the very short term weather sometimes isn’t correct is because they appear to only do forecasts twice a day or something, and also because their weather stations are quite widely spaced – for example I think our nearest is 20 miles away near Nottingham, the other side of a load of hills, which means they probably don’t have much of an idea about the exact weather happening here at any given time. The BBC tells you on their site when they are updated, and where the weather stations are. I don’t understand why things aren’t updated regularly, but I suspect that running a forecast takes a lot of computer power; it’d be great if they ran a real-time forecasting model of some kind to fix that, but I don’t know if they exist or how accurate they’d be.

They run them continuously and average them out. It does change a few times through the day.

The algorithm that converts the actual weather model to a single icon doesn’t change as often.

Weatherspark has more data about the weather than you can shake a stick at, and the option of choosing several different forecast services to give you a more balanced view. It’s really the best, and the fact that it gives a whole host of extra information makes it the one I use most these days

Yr.no the most accurate for up to a week ahead. Turn your phone sideways for the day/graph thingy from the full site.

Metcheck appears to of had a refurb and is now back up and running

For the record, the BBC said rain, and it’s raining.

I tracked a variety of forecasts over the eight days leading into my daughters birthday party a few weeks back.

Accuweather was the most accurate. It began as an outlier, but over the course of the week the other forecasts converged on its position.

V impressed, but absolutely recognise this has no statistical validity!

If there’s something weather dependant coming up for me I tend to check a few different sites to see what they say – and only believe them when they all start to say the same sort of thing.

The S4C weather iPhone app seems pretty good. And I’m not even Welsh