Tabloids are raving about hottest ever end to May, heatwave summer etc. One year they have to be right, like a broken clock is right twice a day, but is this useful forecasting, or even forecasting at all?
I’m feeling overwhelmed by the latest tabloid weather offerings which are being gleefully and carelessly cut and pasted each day. Forecasting over 2 weeks ahead, that we will break records in the UK. Surely records started in 1910 with Met Office, some recorded since 1875 with the Royal Met Society but that’s only 141 years ago. Where does 170 years come from?
Lots of people are mentioning this, and worse sharing the article, don’t. I do get asked “Are we going to have a nice summer” quite often by people who are just hopeful that we’ll get a decent warm, dry even sunny spell at some point. These heatwave headlines are in peoples’ minds and on their Facebook feeds.
This does happen a lot. There is no benign, quiet, settled, fair, bright spells with a few showers weather in the Tabloid world. It is all extreme. Wildly swinging from coldest ever freezing ten-foot snow to flood ravaging storms and killer gales, to heatwave record breaking temperatures.
It has been very systematic how these articles are put together and their regularity. As they are shared so much, it is taken they are popular.
Create your own
You can have ago at creating your own weather article, it’s easy and formulaic , ask a friend to be your expert or even someone from down the pub. I’ve asked Roger Hargreave's Mr Snow.
Template
1.Chose a time of year
Oct/ Nov- Forecast coldest winter ever, everyone is going to die, freezing temperatures plummet to *insert feels like temperature from top of Cairngorm, lowest one you can find on any day*.
Dec – Bookies slash odds on White Christmas, fill article with lots of pictures of sledges and winter scenes from Scandinavia.
Jan/Feb/ Mar - Scare stories with killer floods, El Niño, snow covering whole of UK next week. Remind everyone winter cold kills more people than heatwaves. Find some random American bloke on twitter to give you a quote about UK summer, he won’t care if it’s wrong.
April - start hottest ever Easter stories, interspersed with snow at Easter stories, hedge your bets, this time of year is extra fickle.
May - hottest ever killer heatwave summer coming, starts end of May for BH weekend and will last * insert number of months/weeks/ days*, different from what you made up last year, a dart board may help at this point.
June/July/August – bonanza time for weather stories. Fill 2/3 of page with pretty gals in bikinis, odd one of kids with ice-creams and sandcastles, more beach shots. Don’t do any research about what records actually are, just change all temps into Fahrenheit and put !!! at end.
2. Put in RANDOM capitals for your HEADLINE
3. Quote Met Office half way down page, so people see Met Office mentioned but don’t realise extreme quote by other random ‘experts’ is just exaggeration to get in national papers.
4. Source images, random NASA graphs, numerous photos of half clad women
Example – (Disclaimer: this is not a real forecast)
Forecasters (we’re not naming them) said (but not in quotes), we will see record breaking cold and frost and huge amount of snow. Extreme "cold surges" will push down from the Arctic or Antarctica, I can never remember which is which, sending this month into the record books with temperatures expected to stay well below average.
Mr Snow from PreciseWeather said
There will be “Millions and billions and trillions of big white soft snowflakes covering the whole wide world”. Mr Snow continued there is no reason why temperatures won’t plummet down to minus -22C, that’s 251 Kelvin randomly. It will snow for 2 months, no 4 months but maybe it won’t and it could be really warm.
A Met Office spokesman said: “The outlook for next 5 days is to be cooler than average across the UK with rain, we don’t do forecasts for the whole summer and this headline is nothing to do with us”
The Met Office have sent local councils into a frenzy of grit buying with their chilly el Nino, La Nina, La Madre, El Sombrero Global warming, climate change predictions.
5. Finish article with other quotes or cut and paste jobs from few more weather companies with less extreme views and forecasts to fill out article and other photos.
Job’s a good’un, repeat 3 times a week.
Yes, end of May into June, generally it does warm up. Summer is warmer than winter, days are getting longer. There are signs on the charts that there will be warmer air pushing up from the continent for the end of May, with southern Britain at least feeling warmer. The lively scarlet chart with high pressure on that's accompanied several of this week's articles is already out of date. It was for T+384, 16 days ahead, over 2 weeks away for Friday 27th May. It told a story with its hot red colour and upper High but in isolation it’s not a forecast for Summer, and Spring finishes end of May, meteorologically.
Now the chart shows temperatures into the low 20s C and a touch of frost for NE Britain to start the day. That far ahead, things can change so much with each run of the model. So at the moment End of May Bank holiday does have hope for some fine, warm weather but it’s still a long way off
If you wanted to write a forecast for the summer now; there will probably be a great week of sunshine, heat and many people will be happy and be smiling (not all, we know everyone doesn’t like it). But most of the UK summer could just be middling, bright fair amount of cloud, bit breezy, warm enough but then slipping back to cool conditions and you need a cardigan. This is not the stuff of headlines, which is why we get all this HEATWAVE rants. Mostly, our weather isn’t extreme. Let’s stick with 7 to 10 day forecasts for now, we’re accused of getting those wrong all the time anyway, but that’s not true!
All this conjecture is to make you buy the paper or worse SHARE it online. Each share is a LIKE, a nod to the article, an encouragement to write more.
The Sun got in trouble this week for its Queen/Brexit writings. The Independent Press Standards Organisation, IPSO ruled that only the Sun’s headline had breached its code saying: "Tabloid newspapers like the Sun have long made eye-catching assertions in headlines alongside a smaller headline to qualify or attribute them. It is a standard device."In this instant the suggestion was "conjecture" and was "significantly misleading”.
conjecture.
an opinion or conclusion formed on the basis of incomplete information. speculation, fancy, notion, belief, guesswork, informal guesstimate, shot in the dark: Certain weather articles?
Maybe, we will see the maximum temperature beaten this year. It stands at 38.5C from August 2003, last year we saw 36.7C in Heathrow and Gravesend, July. There isn't any forecast evidence for this yet. Climate change means we will see further extremes in temperatures and rainfall/flooding events but that’s another kettle of fish. Yes, we will see 33C somewhere this summer, but does that make the whole summer a “sizzler” for all UK, no.
The Met Office, trying to avoid being tarred by all this, offer an explanation in their blog but it doesn’t stick in the mind as easily as HEATWAVE summer does. Relating to their 3 month ahead contingency planning forecast:
“The current forecast does not cover all the summer months (June, July, August), it is for May, June and July, and for this period long-range prediction systems only weakly favour certain types of weather patterns above others. Therefore, the outlook suggests the chances of above – or below – average rainfall is approximately similar, while there is only a slight increased risk of warmer than average conditions. Met Office Blog
Jeff Knight, head of Climate Variability at the Met Office said; “Currently, there are no strong drivers of our weather patterns in the same way El Nino was this winter and spring. This results in fairly well-balanced chances of different kinds of weather this summer. ”
So, if you are after a forecast, come to Netweather. There are the daily forecast articles for next few days, location forecasts for next 7 or 10 days, plenty of discussion and chat about models, heat and sunshine, coldies, snow, whatever you love and answers to “I just read we’re in for a sizzling HEATWAVE summer, is that true?”
(There has been a late addition to 170 year article pointing to the CET Central England Temperature set from 1833 but that just says it won’t beat May's 15.1c. That’s not that warm is it, or are you talking about something different all together without explaining. Keep us wondering.)
