The Met OfficeUKMO The Meteorological Office is the United Kingdom's national weather service. It is an executive agency and trading fund of the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy have just introduced a new feature to their forecasts you find on their weather app or on their website. As well as including the probable daily maximum and minimum temperatures for the next seven days, they also now include values for the highest and lowest possible temperatures for that day too. The BBCBBC The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is the national broadcaster of the United Kingdom, based at Broadcasting House in London. It is the world's oldest national broadcaster, and the largest broadcaster in the world by number of employees, employing over 22,000 staff in total, of whom approximately 19,000 are in public-sector broadcasting. do the same thing in their forecasts, but as far as I know, it remains hidden and unused in the HTML.
Personally, I can’t see what benefit this ‘fudge factor’ is to any forecast, other than adding a degree (pardon the pun) of uncertainty to the end user – which temperature is it going to be today or tonight, probable or possible? It also makes a bit of a nonsense of having fixed hourly temperatures, which remain presumably of the ‘probable’ variety.
I’ve been doing some verification work on forecast three hourly temperatures over the past year, and I’ve found their forecast temperatures vary dramatically from the actual reported values beyond T+36. It’s a little bit early but I’ve not noticed any significant improvement since I started using the new beta data.
All I can say is if that people do complain to them about the accuracy of their temperature forecasts in the future, this will be a very neat way of getting them out of a fix. 🤨