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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!"
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
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.
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.