Slashdot Mirror
Met Office Loses BBC Weather Forecasting Contract
An anonymous reader writes: UK weather forecasts could be run on computers in New Zealand, as the BBC announced that the UK Met Office lost a forecasting contract it held for almost 100 years. The Guardian reports: "The Met Office has lost the contract it has held for close to a century to provide weather forecasts to the BBC, bringing to an end one of the longest relationships in British media. The broadcaster said it was legally required to open up the contract to outside competition in order to secure the best value for licence fee payers. The meteorological service said it was disappointed by the BBC’s decision to put out to tender the contract, which has been in place since the corporation’s first radio weather bulletin on 14 November 1922. Steve Noyes, operations and customer services director at the Met Office, said: 'Nobody knows Britain’s weather better and, during our long relationship with the BBC, we’ve revolutionised weather communication to make it an integral part of British daily life.'"
Can't the Met Office submit a tender themselves?
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Given how appallingly useless and invariably inaccurate the weather forecasts are here in NZ, I can only imagine this was a desperate cost cutting ploy by the BBC - perhaps due to lost Top Gear revenues.
It's been done a few times before. Frequently ITV will buy from other than the Met Office and its forcasts have generally been worse.
Problematically, it;'s STILL considered "the Met Office got it wrong AGAIN" because they're the weather men and the weather report is from weather men, so it must be the Met Office.
The Met Office will still be paid because the MOD need the services of a full observing network and most (probably the vast majority) of the weather related costs are for that, and the computer used for the forecast are purchased so that it can meet demanding targets of weather forcasting, where the obs may come in late and an accurate forecast requires all the obs in, so has less than the three hour window to manage to produce the model output.
And it needs duplication in case one system goes down.
AND it is the only WMO organisation that has proven it can manage the WMO requirements of taking over for the other two WMO core partners (Russia and the USA) if their computer systems fall down. Russia has partially managed a reduced service for the others, but the USA has failed entirely to even test that it could manage this requirement.
That's right: Russia is handily beating the USA in its international commitments AND technology. PWNED motherhubbards!
The Met Office regularly test their procedures for failover and producing Russian and USA forecasts for their domestic use to ensure procedures are working. The USA has never tested their procedures once.
NOTE: the climate work is done on the computer when it isn't busy doing the weather. The weather is an operational requirement and overrides and even terminates with extreme prejudice any climate work, so the climate computing is effectively free, piggybacking on the overengineering required for the WMO commitments they have to undertake and the operational requirements of providing the weather services.
Yes, I did work for them a few years ago.
Seriously, the USA sucks balls at their Met work. Not in their output, but they are barely able to manage the requirements for their own service, but signed up for willy-waving purposes as a core WMO center and have never bothered to put any effort into it.