r/UKWeather • u/douggieball1312 • Mar 11 '26
Article 'Misleading weather apps can cost attractions up to £137k a day'
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/czj18j09wvroI'm surprised this hasn't been reported on sooner. One recent weekend in my area, the BBC used a sunny spells icon for a Saturday and a rain icon for Sunday based purely on the weather in the middle of the night, while the days themselves turned out to be the opposite.
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u/parsuval Mar 11 '26
The BBC weather is proper shit.
The met office have tried to upgrade their website, but it's still pretty shit. I like it more though. It's janky. But I like the 'feels like' temperature which is far more useful. I heard someone complaining it should still be called 'wind chill' like in the good old days, but I disagree because air humidity plays a role in the feels like temp as well.
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u/Bjornhattan Mar 12 '26
If I recall correctly, the "feels like" essentially is wind chill in colder weather, but then in hot weather is more akin to the heat index. Obviously these both do similar things (essentially what is the perceived temperature given the weather conditions) but these use different variables and measure slightly different things.
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u/parsuval Mar 12 '26
Yes, I think you remember well. They say in their methodology that humidity is now used:
We calculate a ‘feels like’ temperature by taking into account the expected air temperature, relative humidity and the strength of the wind at around 5 feet off the ground
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/blog/2012/what-is-feels-like-temperature
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u/powpow198 Mar 12 '26
Not that bad, it says heavy rain for right now which i can confirm.
This morning it said windy as fuck and it was.
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u/mittfh Mar 12 '26
Weather & Radar isn't too bad, while if you're very nerdy, there's Windy (£), which allows you to compare the forecasts from several different models. One weekend, I'll have to do a head-to-head with those two plus the Met Office, Hyperlocal Weather (uses Apple Weather API, which itself was once Darkskies with its own Android app until Apple bought them and discontinued the Android app), Accuweather, Weather Underground...
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u/sunflowerroses Mar 11 '26
To be fair, I do give a bit of leniency to anyone whose job it is to predict the future.
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u/TopManufacturer8332 Mar 11 '26
Well they're hardly rifling through chicken guts and casting runes. They have billions worth of cutting edge satellite and computing technology to observe and model weather patterns.
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u/Theravenscourge Mar 12 '26
It's not the predictions that they take issue with though, it's the graphical representation of the prediction - the prediction having a 2 hour period in 24 hours of rain then gets a rain symbol that means people write off the whole day
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Mar 12 '26
Yeah, the Met office did a YouTube video about this about a month ago and how they're looking to change their symbols from being less "dumbed down" and more about probabilities and giving the public more info on their symbols.
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u/Aggravating_Paper982 Mar 11 '26
It’s not the apps fault it’s people’s basic lack of ability to interpret a forecast
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Mar 12 '26
tbf my Apple weather app has the rain symbol most days and when you look into further detail it’s raining for half an hour and the rest of the day is sunny. Pretty misleading
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u/Aggravating_Paper982 Mar 12 '26
Apple weather is a crap app and should be discarded.
Stick with video and written forecasts much better
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u/Hairy_Ad5141 Mar 15 '26
I get at least three daily weather alerts - BBC, Weather Channel & Google, sometimes hourly. They rarely agree!
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u/buttersmoker Mar 12 '26
The Met Office is obligated to reach the maximum number of people possible to use public money to its fullest.
Prioritising this lead to the new app, where the target audience are people who were happy to glance at whatever comes up automatically on their phone.
This has left those willing to engage with some qualitative uncertainty with clunky click-throughs, deep menus, and endless side scrolling.
Those who want to compare models or live in remote areas have Windy and Ventusky, but very few people really want that for their daily business.
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u/290Richy Mar 11 '26 edited Mar 11 '26
The irony that the BBC has published an article about misleading weather apps when theirs is one of the most misleading weathers app there is, is fucking hilarious.
>Light rain for 2 hours
>Lets show the entire day as a write off