BBC

Media backlash to warmest May on record

You may have noticed the media backlash to this weeks news that May 2024 was the warmest in the UKUK The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. since at least 1883. I think the ferocity of the backlash surprised most people at 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. and 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.
For the first half of May, the warmest of the weather occurred across northern Scotland, and because the UKMOUKMO 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 and BBC have a seemingly inbuilt reluctance to report extremes for places other than in the south of England, news of +6°C anomalies didn’t get much of a mention, either on Twitter/X, in YouTube videos or in TV forecasts.
Here are just a few of my Tweets from the middle of May to try and highlight the exceptional early warmth across the Highlands:

I believe one of the main reasons for the backlash is the inability of the UKMO and BBC to monitor evolving climate stories across the UK. If the UKMO had incorporated climate news, similar to some of my Tweets, at the start of their ‘Deep Dives’, ’10 Day Trends’ or video forecasts, and the BBC had done the same in ‘Weather For The Week Ahead’, then news of a record warm May might not have come as such a big surprise!

BBC, Climate, UKMO

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A bar chart that shows both temperature and anomaly

For people who can’t get their heads around anomalies I’ve made a slight variation on just a simple bar chart of anomalies. The twist is that it now displays both daily temperatures and anomalies, temperatures on the left Y axis and anomalies on the right Y axis. My 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. NWPNWP Numerical weather prediction uses mathematical models of the atmosphere and oceans to predict the weather based on current weather conditions. application downloads forecast data the BBC use in their own weather app, and parses the HTML and extracts hourly and daily forecast values for each site. I’ve kept the same scale for the extremes in each charts Y axis for each site I display in the grid to aid comparison. So you can now quickly see at a glance the forecast temperature and how it compares with the LTALTA Long Term Average. This is usually defined as a 30 year period by the WMO..

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Anomalies, BBC, Software, Temperature

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A rogues gallery

I’ve been busy over the last couple of days updating that old application I wrote a few years ago now to keep a list of all 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. weather presenters since 1954. I thought that at the same time I would add all the ITV presenters and all regional and UKMOUKMO 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 presenters that I could find as well. I found the best way of doing this was using YouTube to search and grab a 112 x 112 thumbnail image of each of them.
I was amazed just how many of I found – 148 of them!
I don’t recognise many of those in the ITV regions, but I do recognise a good proportion of those on the BBC from our travels around the UKUK The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. over the years. What strikes me that there’s a whole big weather presenters world out there, and once thy hit the big time on national TV they are very loathed to leave it behind, Tomasz Schafernaker already has 23 years under his belt bar an infamous short break.
Once I’ve fully populated the data set, I will be able to do some further analysis on which country all these presenterts are from. I already know that 53.4% of them are female, which is not that surprising, because the ITV seem to rarely employ a man when you can employ pretty women, and who can blame them.
Finally here is a Gantt chart timeline of presenters of the national Weather on BBC TV since 1954, again some of the data is incomplete or wrong, and I am a few presenters short, particularly before 1980. George Cowling who did the first national forecast headed a team of three – but who were they?

BBC, ITV, Presenters

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Cold wave across North America

23 Dec 2022
12 UTCUTC Coordinated Universal Time or UTC is the primary time standard by which the world regulates clocks and time. It is within about 1 second of mean solar time (such as UT1) at 0° longitude (at the IERS Reference Meridian as the currently used prime meridian) and is not adjusted for daylight saving time. It is effectively a successor to Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). analysis

Dear Diary
A lot of sensational reporting going on in the media about the low that’s been undergoing cyclogenesis in the eastern parts of the Great Lakes today, and the cold wave that’s introducing Arctic air across much of North America in its wake, as the low tracks NENE North East’ward into Canada. 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. News seems content to report temperatures in degrees Fahrenheit, perhaps because it makes the negative numbers even larger. Here are a few of the phrases that I’ve picked up from the BBC reports.

  • Weather Bomb
  • Bomb cyclone
  • Flash freezing
  • Brutal cold

The cold front has certainly dropped temperatures as it’s raced through. In my experience wind chills of -40°C or lower are very severe, but far from unprecedented across North America, and ones like this usually occur in most winters, but what the hell do I know. Another thing I don’t know is if the NWSNWS National weather service definition, an agency of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that is responsible for meteorological observations. has named the culprit low, perhaps it has descended into the realms of lunacy as most of its European counterpart Met Services have.

23 Dec 2022
12 UTC wind chill

Analysis, BBC, Cold, N America, Wind chill

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Countryfile Forecast (adagio)

Dear Diary
I just noticed that you now can set different speeds on 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. iPlayer, so I thought I would try it out on this evenings Countryfile forecast. SKLSKL Sarah Keith-Lucas an English meteorologist and BBC weather presenter is still far too fast even at x0.8, so I slowed her down to x0.5, and she now sounds like she’s had a bit too much to drink.
It also looks more and more certain that this cold spell will end on the 18th as I mentioned yesterday. It doesn’t seem that it’s going to put up much of a fight which I can’t honestly believe is right. NWPNWP Numerical weather prediction uses mathematical models of the atmosphere and oceans to predict the weather based on current weather conditions. models have always been notoriously wrong at ending a cold spell too quickly and I’m sure this one won’t go without a fight.

BBC

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We’ve got a widespread frost

Dear Diary,
Carol Kirkwood reckons that “We’ve got a widespread frost”. Not really Carol that’s not a widespread frost, if you look at a chart of the 18-06 minimum temperatures this morning (an air) frost has occurred in places where high ground has given shelter from the wind and helped to keep skies clear of cloud across southern Scotland, and parts of western England. We may have a widespread frost later in the week by the looks of it. I would agree that there may have been a widespread ground frost, but that wasn’t what she was talking about.

BBC, Frost

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Is Aviemore on top of a hill?

Dear Diary,
CFCF Chris Fawkes is a BBC Weather Forecaster, presenting across all the BBC’s channels. believes for some reason that the weather station in Aviemore is up at about “three or four hundred metres”. The station height at Aviemore in reality is just 220 metres AMSLAMSL The height Above Mean Sea Level., not on top of a hill, but in the Spey valley and within a kilometre of the river itself. That’s what makes it such a great frost hollow in the shelter and shadow of rising ground the other side of the A9 to its west. In fact only one of the four sites he calls “higher communities” are that high, Merthyr Tydfil is at ~180 M, Buxton ~305 M and Enniskillen ~51 M.
CF, thinking that Aviemore is some kind of hill station will have no doubt coloured is thinking of observations from their over the years, but then again he does suffer from Scotia MyopiaScotia Myopia The inability to recognise the weather in Scotland in any of their forecasts, often preferring to talk about anywhere else in the UK, but usually the SE of England. Often incurable. quite severely.

Courtesy of Ordnance Survey

BBC, Scotland, Stations

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Contradictory temperature charts

Dear Diary,
Temperatures are only just going to manage to get up above freezing for a short while across the Highlands this afternoon. The air temperature at Aviemore was -1.2°C at 1100 UTCUTC Coordinated Universal Time or UTC is the primary time standard by which the world regulates clocks and time. It is within about 1 second of mean solar time (such as UT1) at 0° longitude (at the IERS Reference Meridian as the currently used prime meridian) and is not adjusted for daylight saving time. It is effectively a successor to Greenwich Mean Time (GMT)., and here in StrathpefferStrathpeffer Strathpeffer (Scottish Gaelic: Srath Pheofhair) is a village and spa town in Easter Ross, Highland, Scotland, with a population of 1,469. it’s just 2.2°C at 1215 UTC. Just caught the latest forecast from 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. on the News Channel. SKLSKL Sarah Keith-Lucas an English meteorologist and BBC weather presenter reckons that it won’t be quite as cold as last night with only a patchy frost overnight particular across Scotland, and then goes onto show this rather contradictory graphic of temperatures at 06 UTC, with labels of temperature that bare no relation to the NWPNWP Numerical weather prediction uses mathematical models of the atmosphere and oceans to predict the weather based on current weather conditions. blue contoured data that they overlay on the chart which also seems to be missing a few labels as well.
With a maximum of 2°C so far today I would make an educated guess that we’ll see a widespread moderate frost across the Highlands overnight and not at all patchy.

BBC News Channel
1157
BBC, Frost, Scotland

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Cairngorm Winds

Ben Rich should have taken a look at the observations from mountain stations across Scotland, he might then have realised that you didn’t have to look at high level wind at 35,000 feet to find extremely windy conditions.

BBC, Wind

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