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Met Office loses BBC weather forecasting contract after 93 years

theguardian.com

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Re: Met Office loses BBC weather forecasting contract after 93 years

#31

Post by DanBC »

keithpeter wrote: post #16
binarymax wrote: post #8

I've lived in the UK for the past 8 years now (having lived in various places in the East Coast USA for the rest of my life). I learned quickly that English weather forecasts are useless past the current day. It is probably due to the geographical location. East Coast US was accurate to 3 to 5 days. I just use Dark Sky[0] to get weather for the next several hours, which is mostly accurate. Given the situation with th…

Yup - you are somewhere on a fairly narrow island with warm water flowing South to North and a cold wind at high altitude blowing West to East (or is it East to West? I always get that mixed up). It is going to be slightly changeable. I'm assuming the Met will still bid for the contract, and we shall see who gets it. Pity them the first time they get it badly wrong!

The met has bid for the contract, and lost the bid. The BBC and the met have both independantly confirmed tha. The met office isn't going to be providing weather data to the BBC.

Some of the staff (the presenters tended to be real meteorologists workig for the met office) might transfer over; severe weather stuff is still going to come from the met office; the Shipping Forecast is not a met office thing so should be unaffected.

Re: Met Office loses BBC weather forecasting contract after 93 years

#32

Post by toyg »

tezza wrote: post #22

I'm sure the £4.5M bonus pool paid for 'improved performance' really stuck in the craw. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/met-office-st...

There is another subtext: the current government is on a privatization drive. Met Office is a prime candidate for being spun off, since it's already trading. Making them lose one of their biggest customers will force them to find new ones (readying MO for full privatization) or failing that, put their finances in an unsustainable position (readying MO for full privatization or even shutdown).

The BBC has many ongoing fights with the current government, so this was probably a relatively easy wish to grant in order to build back some favour. Among other things, it could end up reducing expenses for them, so it's a win-win as far as the BBC is concerned.

Re: Met Office loses BBC weather forecasting contract after 93 years

#33

Post by noir_lord »

Next up, Privatisation of the Met Office then.

Shame as while the BBC websites presentation of the data is pretty poor the MET provide open data feeds (hard to see that continuing if they are privatised) of 3 hourly forecasts out to 5 days for 5000 locations that are considerably more accurate and detailed.

http://i.imgur.com/vuCklmn.png is their example usage of the data.

Re: Met Office loses BBC weather forecasting contract after 93 years

#34

Post by Kenji »

Gotta love this:

1/Extremely alarmed by rumours BBC to drop UK Met Office in favour of foreign weather forecaster. Vital 90 year old strategic relationship.

2/Not only weather forecasting. Shipping forecast, extreme weather/crisis events/national defence. Madness if true. Govt must intervene

No, government doesn't have to intervene. Silly man, competition drives quality. We don't need a governmental lid on quality.

Re: Met Office loses BBC weather forecasting contract after 93 years

#35

Post by DanBC »

toyg wrote: post #32
tezza wrote: post #22

I'm sure the £4.5M bonus pool paid for 'improved performance' really stuck in the craw. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/met-office-st...

There is another subtext: the current government is on a privatization drive. Met Office is a prime candidate for being spun off, since it's already trading. Making them lose one of their biggest customers will force them to find new ones (readying MO for full privatization) or failing that, put their finances in an unsustainable position (readying MO for full privatization or even shutdown). The BBC has many ongoing…

The met office is already a "trading fund" - which means they're required to run on a commercial basis.

http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/about-us/who/management

The BBC was not a huge amount of money for the met office. They have plenty of other customers. (Sky, ITV, Channel 4, are other media companies.)

Re: Met Office loses BBC weather forecasting contract after 93 years

#36

Post by wiredfool »

ars wrote: post #29
binarymax wrote: post #8

I've lived in the UK for the past 8 years now (having lived in various places in the East Coast USA for the rest of my life). I learned quickly that English weather forecasts are useless past the current day. It is probably due to the geographical location. East Coast US was accurate to 3 to 5 days. I just use Dark Sky[0] to get weather for the next several hours, which is mostly accurate. Given the situation with th…

> East Coast US was accurate to 3 to 5 days Interestingly in the US, the East Coast forecast is more accurate than the West Coast. This is because the trade winds in the US mostly move West to East, so most of the Weather moves in that direction as well. There are more weather sensors on land then in the Sea, so there is more data available to make a forecast with.

And, up until the last year or so, there were parts of the west coast (basically, off the olympic peninsula) that didn't have any offshore radar coverage. So there were certain classes of dangerous storms that could sneak up and whack Seattle. (One of the storms that did in a floating bridge did this, basically, no one knew that there was a hurricane force storm until it hit the coast, and from then, it was an hour to Seattle)

Re: Met Office loses BBC weather forecasting contract after 93 years

#37

Post by notatoad »

binarymax wrote: post #8

I've lived in the UK for the past 8 years now (having lived in various places in the East Coast USA for the rest of my life). I learned quickly that English weather forecasts are useless past the current day. It is probably due to the geographical location. East Coast US was accurate to 3 to 5 days. I just use Dark Sky[0] to get weather for the next several hours, which is mostly accurate. Given the situation with th…

It's probably worth noting that Forecast.io and Dark Sky use the Met Office's radar, prediction system, and severe weather warning system (in conjunction with other data sources) to create their forecasts.

Re: Met Office loses BBC weather forecasting contract after 93 years

#40

Post by chrisseaton »

DanBC wrote: post #31
keithpeter wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup - you are somewhere on a fairly narrow island with warm water flowing South to North and a cold wind at high altitude blowing West to East (or is it East to West? I always get that mixed up). It is going to be slightly changeable. I'm assuming the Met will still bid for the contract, and we shall see who gets it. Pity them the first time they get it badly wrong!

The met has bid for the contract, and lost the bid. The BBC and the met have both independantly confirmed tha. The met office isn't going to be providing weather data to the BBC. Some of the staff (the presenters tended to be real meteorologists workig for the met office) might transfer over; severe weather stuff is still going to come from the met office; the Shipping Forecast is not a met office thing so should be…

> the Shipping Forecast is not a met office thing

Isn't it? It always starts with 'And now the shipping forecast issued by the Met Office, on behalf of the Maritime and Coastguard Agency, at...'

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