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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.
I'd say the Met became complacent if they haven't made the short list. Either they're charging too much for what they do, or they aren't doing it as well as the competitors who submitted tenders.
Either way, losing the contract is their own damn fault. No business can ever afford to assume a long term customer will continue to be a customer unless they have a monopoly.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
This could be one case where a tender doesn't make sense. The Met Office is obliged to give weather warnings, provide shipping weather information, etc. and if the BBC is cross-funding that then going elsewhere just means the government will have to give the Met Office more money directly. So now the public are funding the BBC to pay another company, and the Met Office too.
The BBC (and Channel 4) are the only ones who use Met Office meteorologists, actual scientists who know what the fuck they are taking about. All others use dolly birds (and boys, occasionally) as presenters going "Scorchio" and save the facts for sensationalist "when clouds attack" type features.
I'd much rather have someone able to explain what is happening than a parroted summary and it ties in neatly with the charter to educate that the BBC has.
"Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
If they source it to the Spanish weather service, maybe the weather across the UK will improve! I heard their forecasts are much better! :-)
Scorcio!
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Sheesh, the NZ MetService can't even guess NZ's weather, let alone what's going to happen in the UK. Having said that, the article said "companies in NZ", which could be something like MetVUW, which regularly outperforms the MetService in accuracy, as well as providing much more detailed information than the MetService's dumbed-down "it may rain tomorrow, but fscked if we're going to give you any more information than that".
(It's always interesting being with groups like pilots who are required to use the MetService info by law and see them going to MetVUW to see what's really going on).
Why should we, given that they are?
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
"Why is the BBC (a corporation with a royal charter) paying the Met Office (a government entity) for weather forecasting?"
Because political correctness requires everything to be paid for. If neoliberals had their way, children would have to pay their parents for board and lodging.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
So now the British taxpayer's money will go out of the country to (possibly) New Zealand whereas it used to go into other British taxpayers pockets who paid British taxes which went back into the British Treasury. Straight Thatcherism con-job - sounds like you're getting a bargain but we're giving your money to strangers.
I worked for a software company that had a contract with the Senate of Canada to supply software.
One of the times that we sent them a free update it got stopped by canadian customs at the border. They asked me the value of the package and I told them it was free. They did not like that so I told them it was 8 floppies and at 5 cents each it was 40 cents. They did not like that answer.
I finally asked them if they understood that it was going to the Senate of Canada. They said they did but they still must collect a tariff on it!
I finally just lost it and said you do know that you are trying to collect money from the government of Canada to give the government of Canada!
He said yes. I told him he had just invented taxerbation.
We set up a BBS that day so they could download the updates.
Yes this was pre internet.
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The problem with the Met Office meteorologists is that while they may know the science they suck at presenting it. Their forecasts are hard to follow and bizarrely organized. Earlier this year Radio 4 experimented with different techniques, some of them suggested by people who specialize in communicating information. There were all better than the Met Office approach, but by far the best was the "shipping forecast" method where they simply went around the country and gave the forecast for each area consecutively.
Of course after the experiment they went back to the Met Office way of trying to confuse the listener/viewer by mixing time, space and inane commentary.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
They're basically two government agencies... one sending another a bill but both of them ultimately sustained with tax dollars. So... lower the "bill".
its not like the met office needs to make to make a profit or in fact needs to make anything off that fee. What is more, organizations don't have to change every customer the same amount for a given service.
If I'm selling apples, I can sell the same apples to John for 1 pound and to Tim I can change him 1000 pounds.
So... lower the price the met is charging to whatever is less than the competition... "win the contract" in the way that phoney baloney government agencies do... and stop whining.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Same AC here that started the thread. I'm not sure if the BBC forecasts look like the video forecasts on the Met Office site, so I'm not sure how relevant my comments are. I went and watched one of those video forecasts this morning. I live in the US and was actually a bit surprised about what I saw.
Normally here in the US, you do four things, in this order:
1) show the current local and maybe regional conditions (temperature, wind, etc...)
2) show the satellite and radar
3) show some forecast maps with high pressure, low pressure, fronts, precipitation, temperatures, and maybe winds (not all on the same map!)
4) give a five or seven day local forecast
If you're giving a national forecast, you would skip step #4. But everything else probably needs to stay the same. You show the current weather and then some forecast maps. The lady giving the forecast kept talking about low pressure and occluded fronts, but the maps didn't have any of those things clearly marked. As a meteorologist, I could pick out roughly where those features were. But the ordinary person can't do that. I was focused on trying to figure that out and so even I didn't really follow the forecast. And I'm a meteorologist. That ought to say something. And for that matter, the ordinary person doesn't know what an occluded front is or why it matters. It's when a cold front catches up to a warm front, but I don't expect that a non-meteorologist has a reason to know this or why it matters.
Here in the US, the people on TV are trained as meteorologists but they also do a better job of communicating things. I'd say that the UK forecast probably should have current conditions (temperature and stuff) for the entire country. Then show satellite and radar. Maybe draw in low and high pressure and fronts so it's easier for people to follow. Show a forecast map or two with lows, highs, and fronts. Then go around to each region and give a forecast for that area. In other words, you tell the viewer what's happening now, then you explain what the weather is going to do in the future (storm systems, warm/cold fronts... keep it simple), and then give a forecast with temperatures and precipitation for each region. And don't go crazy with occluded fronts. :)
I just don't think it has to be a trade-off between someone who understands meteorology and someone who can communicate. There are plenty of people who do both!
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.
So the government fat cats, got lazy, complacent, and entitled. Failed to compete in the market, and that is supposed to be a bad thing??
Out of interest, where can I watch MET Office broadcasts? I'm fairly sure the weather reports on the BBC are done by the BBC.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
The BBC uses Met Office presenters, and they generally control how the forecast is given. I thought everyone knew that, I mean it says so on the screen every time.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Nope, didn't know. TIL...
SJW n. One who posts facts.
The Met office bulletins are what you would expect from a bunch of scientists: lots of facts and assumption of knowledge. Contrast with BBC whose job is to make programmes. They have the knowledge of presenting to a population of millions and so assist to that end.
As for the general layman not knowing what an occluded front is, we've had highly informative bulletins explaining what they are for decades over here. A major proportion of our weather fronts are occluded (which is why it rains so bloody much) and I learned what one was from the BBC forecasts, when I was about six and we'd just had the longest, hottest and driest summer "since records began".
The assumption that people "don't know" about weather systems is why the BBC has such in depth detail: part of the charter for their existence is to educate, and not just children. We in Britain have probably a higher understanding of the weather because we are taught it via television. Plus it's a national pastime to be amateur meteorologists and discuss it at any given moment as we have so much variation due to being an island at a high latitude with the Gulf stream keeping the water around us warmer than it would otherwise normally be. Also, the jet stream moves north and south of the country on a whim, dragging the remnants of all those tropical storms that hit the US with it.
This is basic stuff and we all know it here. So much so that we can glance at a US bulletin, feel pity for the lack of information imparted, and have a better idea of what is going to happen than the target audience.
"Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
A team who are meteorologists and take the basic facts from Met office data and using their knowledge write the scripts themselves. Other channels use pre-prepared scripts and parrot them off an autocue.
"Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
Weather forecast need an infrastructure of weather stations. Given that they are properties of the weather forecast companies, competition means replicating the same infrastructure, or more likely divide it since there will not be more money flowing to the whole industry to duplicate weather stations.
Competition will therefore not bring a better service here. A solution could be to create a public service for collecting data, and leave competition to interpretation of the data. Or just do not leave that field to competition.
The Met Office is firmly convinced that the planet is warming and that this is leading to an increase in extreme weather events. It is already hard enough to forecast the UK weather because of the constant stream of fronts coming in from the Atlantic, the varying high and low pressure systems.
In my fairly frequent visits to the UK, I notice that they are typically right short term during stable weather periods and not much good during disturbed periods. They often get the transitions wrong. That would all be excusable given the uncertainties.
The longer term however is a different matter. What is not excusable is the issuing of disastrously wrong forecasts of warm winters or warm dry summers, when what actually arrives is freezing cold winter or a cold and very wet summer with floods. These crazy longer range forecasts are not based on any evidence or coherent theory, just a view that the planet is warming and so the weather in the UK must be getting warmer, and so it will be warmer this winter, won't it?
Well, no. The planet is not warming particularly, and the UK climate is not warming particularly either. It is just continuing to fluctuate randomly in a wide range as it always has, and there are quite often fairly extreme winters and summers.
The BBC like the Guardian of which it is in some ways the broadcast voice has been committed to catastrophic global warming in its most extreme form - including the full buy-in to a rise in warming-caused extreme weather events. But the public ridicule that the Met Office forecasts have come in for, and the rather obvious bias in them introduced by the global warming advocacy has made the Met Office a liability. When they forecast a 'barbecue summer' just before the heavens open and the country floods, they wreck their credibility. The BBC is probably, under the new government, also seeking to move away from wholehearted endorsement of global warming and has, to the horror of advocates, started to broadcast some sceptical points of view.
This is said to be a large part of why the Met Office had to go.
Incidentally, on my recent visit we had the amusing spectacle of the left wing contender for leader of the Labour Party, a Party which is ideologically firmly committed to the full global warming alarmist tendency, proposing to open the UK coal mines again! The previous leader was of course the architect of the Climate Act, by which UK CO2 emissions would fall to some 10% of present levels. The Guardian is running a campaign to leave all fossil fuels in the ground. But, you see, those working class mining villages had a wonderful sense of community, and we have to have a revanche against the Thatcherite victory during the miners strike. In the minds of some in England it is still 1980 and everything is left to play for.
So they are going to do their bit for climate change by reopening those mines, at the same time as they convert their power plants to wood pellets sourced in the US nominally in order to lower those same emissions. What are they going to do with the coal? Who knows. One doubts they have thought that far ahead.
Its not an accident that this is the country which gave birth to Monty Python.
If neoliberals had their way, children would have to pay their parents for board and lodging.
Kids these days have it easy.
When I were a lad I had to get up in the morning at ten o'clock at night half an hour before I went to bed, drink a cup of sulphuric acid, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill, and pay mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our Dad and our mother would kill us and dance about on our graves singing Hallelujah.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it