Weather Forecast

[billywilliams]

Does the Met Office over egg the forecast?
Shipping Forecast @ 1725 yesterday - Lundy, Fastnet, Irish Sea 4 or 5 occ 6.
Swansea & Milford CG @ 1700 issued strong wind warning until 0600.

xcweather gave max 14kts! Actual @ Milford Haven was 0500 - 10kts 0800 - 8kts

Shipping @ 0505 today - Lundy, Fastnet, Irish Sea - 4 or 5 occ 6

xcweather @ 0800 for Milford Haven, Bristol Channel, Cardigan Bay etc gives 12 - 14kts max during next 24hrs.

Is the Met Officer getting it wrong or playing safe?

 

[Evadne]

They're both forecasts, so how do you know which one is going to be right?
There's always a range of winds if you use different forecasts, and even monitoring thm and comparing them with experience you find that they vary in accuracy. Some consistently under-forecast wind strengths, some over. Down here in the Solent, the wind is nearly always less than the maximum the met. office forecasts. But not always. I find XCweather is usually less than what it really is, unless I use the offshore forecasts.

 

[Guest]

One of the buoys is measuring 22knots at present. Some of the actual observations on land in the night were 21mph

Also there are 2 front lines clearly visible on the Radar that went through last night and will go through in the next hours.

These are lighter but exactly the same as the front that put the 100 kids in the water off Dublin. That happened with the Met office radar clearly showing the rain line all morning. I know because it was helping a schools sports day and they were asking if the morning would be rain free. They cancelled the sports day and it was on dry land. The front was predicted accurately 2 days earlier.

Normally that piece of water has quite a few wind acceleration areas. That is what comes from looking at averaged modelled data with respect to local forecasting. Averaging over 50Km would also ignore most of the cloud lines.

There has been some fights recently with the BBC mandating the weather from a central office when the local broadcasters know that their local expert is far better at seeing the local situation.