When I was young, one occasionally came across people who were Official Met Office Amateur Weather Observers.
The signs were fairly clear. They were almost always either retired men of a certain kind or spotty youths who had yet to discover girls. They had impeccably tidy gardens, in the middle of which, like a Shinto shrine, would be their collection of Approved Met Office Pattern Instruments. Occasionally a particularly young one would appear on the BBC’s appalling Blue Peter programme.
Every day, the observer would go to the instruments and read them in the Met Office Approved Manner. He would then fill in the Met Office Official Reporting Form, and every so often would send it off in the post and start a fresh one.
I assume that the Met Office still uses these fellows, though I do wonder whether the species might be becoming endangered.
Nowadays we have electronic weather instruments which can easily be connected to a computer, to form a weather-server which will provide its readings as required.
Were one to gather up quite a number of such servers and refer to them regularly, one would soon have a set of data points even more impressive than the Met Office’s exclusive cadre of those who elect to spend their retirement (or to mis-spend their youth) filling in forms.
Were one then to perform upon the data from these points the same sort of calculations as the Met Office are wont to do then one might expect to come up with some weather predictions, just like the Met Office do.
I gather that this is the procedure undertaken by Weather Underground. Their website seems to be maintained by advertising, but it seems that they will collect weather data from just about anywhere.
An interesting idea, but of course they are not proper Met Office meteorologists, and of course they are not using the (allegedly classified) software available to the Met Office’s supercomputers, so of course their predictions are likely to be a bit sketchy.
Except that they’re not. I’ve been comparing form for some months now and am able to say that Weather Underground’s forecasts for this area are consistently more accurate than those of the Met Office.
They are also completely free; the data are provided, essentially at zero cost, by computer-networked observers, and one must conclude that the adverts pay for the website.
The Met Office consistently predicts better weather than actually occurs here, while Weather Underground, perhaps lacking a red telephone connected to the offices of IngSocTourist, does not.
Also refreshingly lacking from Weather Underground’s site is any reference to global warming climate change any damn thing as long it scares the proles into paying more taxes. One is uncharitable enough to suppose that this can hardly be coincidental.
I strongly recommend Weather Underground. I believe that this is the way forward for meteorology; just another more or less fully automatic function of the internet, provided with a bit of extra hardware by enthusiasts and those who have such stuff for their own reasons anyway.
I can see no purpose whatsoever in continuing to pay the Met Office to sack everyone who won’t shout about global warming (when this happened twenty-odd years ago I was convinced that the whole thing was nothing to do with science, and everything to do with geopolitics, and have not changed this view since), to lie about the weather in the hope of increasing tourist revenue, and to bang on about this tired old twentieth-century scare-story for the sake of its political masters.
The original purpose of the Met Office (then a part of the MoD) was to provide weather forecasts for bombers over enemy territory; after WWII its function changed to that of predicting the fall-out patterns arising from the inevitable nuclear war. It is now, like the vast majority of state-funded institutions, little more than a Labour Party / EU / IPCC propaganda engine.
I say close it down. Weather Underground does a better job for nothing. Whatever the Met Office costs, it is too much.
Thank you for the positive review of our website – Weather Underground. We have spent a lot of time and energy trying to build the best forecasts throughout the world. In the UK we also are lucky to have a thriving community of weather station owners who contribute their data to our network, giving us a ton more data than anyone else. That being said, our policy is always to remind everyone that the Local Governments do spend a lot of effort assimilating data that we use to make our forecasts better. We couldn’t do it without them..
By ‘Local Governments’ which do you mean? As in Town, District, County, etc. Councils? What do they do that benefits your service? Do you happen to know what they call it?
The reason I ask is that I can’t remember any of the local government bodies in this area having reported that they allocate any funds at all to the processing of weather data.
I meant local as in country (since we forecast for the entire world, Local means UK Met office). The UK Met office aggregates and assimilates and pays for many weather stations and other data throughout the UK. Same goes for other local governments in most countries.
Would you still be able to collect and process the data were all of the ‘official’ stations replaced with weather-servers?
Good government Met departments including the UK serve a lot of purposes besides just the 5-day forecasts. They assimilate and quality control weather data from official stations, as well as airplanes, boats, buoys, etc. They issue severe weather alerts. They run their own weather models (which we would love to have access too, but haven’t decided to spend the money on it yet). The contribute to the EU for remote sensing (satellites), etc. If you look at the coverage and forecast quality (from any source) for areas like much of Africa, you will see that the government dollars are clearly improving quality.
I should point out – that in the US the tax payers pay for the weather service, and almost everything the weather service produces goes into the public domain. In Europe it is not like this, the taxpayers pay, and then private companies, and indirectly taxpayers pay again for using the forecasts, models, radar data, satellite maps, etc. In my opinion this hasn’t been great for businesses in Europe or elsewhere. Most small-medium sized weather businesses – even European based ones are forced to only use US data because it is free. We could substantially improve our forecasts if we had access to the European data (which right now is prohibitively expensive for us, we need to grow a little larger)
Ah well. Even if you’re not really a libertarian icon, at least you don’t bang on and on about ‘global warming’.
BTW your European business model is missing a piece. When the state’s corporate ‘partners’ sell back to us that which we have already paid for, we are taxed again (currently at 15%).