Why Brits are Fascinated by Weather

Weather forecasting is an odd thing in the UK, we brits are well-known for endlessly talking about it and today I, at least can work out why.

The weather in the UK is totally unreliable. Yes we have seasons, cold winters, warm summers and spring/autumn somewhere in between however we don’t have dry seasons or rainy ones we have both all the time.

My feeling is tha this is caused by being the first lump of land after some 3,000 miles of Atlantic ocean and being at the west end of a predominantly westerly wind having picked up all that moisture from the sea has consequences.

Weather forecasting in the UK seems to be terribly difficult. Millions have been spent on super computers, I think The Met Office has the largest, fastest supercomputer outside of NASA and are now producing very accurate weather forecasts.

By accurate, I mean ‘accurate’ in the way my that teacher did at school during the introduction of electronic calculators. until my final few years I had been using slide rules and log tables to do complex maths (Americans please not its ‘maths’ not ‘math’ as maths is an abbreviation for ‘mathematics’ – a plural and thereby requiring an ‘s’ on the end. .  even on abbreviations). The result of using slide rules and log tables was that it was difficult to find an answer with more than 3 decimal places (i.e. 3.142). However, calculators of the day had 8 decimal places and this led the fabled maths teacher to announce that the pass rate for exams had gone down since the introduction of calculators however he was getting more accurate answers, that is wrong answers to 8 decimal places. If only his students would think a bit more.

In the same way, these accurate weather forecasts are producing forecast maps for weather patterns to within an hour or so accuracy and indeed, today’s forecast by the BBC (sourced from the Met Office), google weather app on my phone and a few others all have forecasted clouds in the morning and sunshine later in the day.

It may be that they are all sourcing their forecast from the one place or it may be that the maths (note the s!) basically broken as it is raining, a really hard summer rain and there are puddles on the supposedly sun-baked patio.

For those unfamiliar with UK weather, summer rain is warmer with larger rain drops than winter rain which is the opposite unless its snow or hail.

So there we have it, the weather forecast is much more accurate but no more correct than it has ever been.

Let the excuses begin. . . My bike is still in the garage . .