... Remembering the past Sunday newspaper forecasts used a wording, General Situation for the coming week which I read and end results all came off of any type of weather, never recalled a back track, delayed, downgrade,s or failed to turn up.
Originally Posted by: Jiries
I've been following these comments with regard the supposed better accuracy of forecasts back in the days of Ceefax and Oracle/Teletext ltd with interest. I followed Ceefax etc from its inception in Sep 1974 to its demise in Oct 2012. My recollection is that it was frequently wrong, and, except under the most static of high pressure systems the weather for the week ahead in newspapers was not worth the paper printed on. I'm sorry but the rose tinted spectacles you are using when trying to assure us that in the golden days of Ceefax the forecast was never wrong and even substantially better than now is incorrect.
Lets look at some facts from when I was working in weather forecasting field.
1972. We moved to an all singing all dancing 10 level model with a 300 km grid.
1982. Upgraded to 15 level 200 km grid, which was later resolved to 150 km grid
1987. The Great Storm of 15/16 October 1987.
We were using the above model for Global Forecasting (15 levels, 1 to 2 runs per day, 150 km grid.) There was also a regional (mainly local to the British Isles finer mesh model which was used experimantally for topographically induced wind fields and local visibilities) The model had placed into it from buoys, ships, aircraft and satellite some 1200 observations over 24 hours. This was processed at around 4 million calculations per second.
And because of the lack of observation in the area of the storms development, plus late arrival of key data, the track and rapid intensification of the storm were missed.
Nowadays I believe (cos I'm now retired and dont get to see all the latest stuff!) that UKV can resolve convective weather to 1.5 KM resolution and soundings through the whole thickness of atmosphere.
The Cray XC40 supercomputer is the one I belive is now in use and has 46000 cores, and top speed of processing of 16 Petaflops (1 petaflop = 10 to the 15 calcs per second.)
Well I could go on and bore everyone, but I think it is safe to say the the assertion that the models were better and more accurate back in the days of good old CEEFAX, are ..well. silly. If you want a good read about Met Office devlopments since the 1950's Try here... it gives tha facts rather tahn rose spectacled opinions.
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/weather/learn-about/how-forecasts-are-made/computer-models/history-of-numerical-weather-prediction
Steve D. FRMetS
Burton Latimer, Kettering, Northants