I’ve been to Met Office training, It’s interesting how they actually forecast and what all that computing power does.
Current feeds come in globally, thousands and thousands of them. In the UK we’re a tiny landmass a lot of them are from bouys out a sea. All this data, humidity, wind speed, temp etc are streamed into the computers. This is then compared to historic info, ie. on this day X years ago the weather at bouy Y was the same as it is today and this was the outcome. All this data of historic trends is crunched in giant computers and used to predict the upcoming weather. It takes an absurd amount of processing just to keep on top of feeds in the UK.
Once the algorithms are run the ‘forecast’ is interpreted by humans, problem is, all it can give is likely indications of future weather conditions based on recorded data, this has to then be turned into a picture on a screen, (30% chance of rain, what do you forecast?)
As soon as one run is finished, the feeds update and another run begins, each time the forecast is updated and is a tiny tiny bit more accurate because the base data is more up to date.
Interestingly they still have hundreds of weather people on the ground filling in records to improve the service, a number of which are still posting in the cards they’ve been filling in for 50 years recording the weather in their gardens. They had rooms of the things a few years ago!
A fascinating day, as to which to believe, go with the BBC, they’re never wrong….