[shark]

Drizzly and dank looking at Burbage not as forecast. Again. Driving on to the Tor instead

[Johnny Brown]

What forecast are you using, that's exactly what was predicted?

[shark]

What forecast are you using, that's exactly what was predicted?

BBC. No rain forecast

[Johnny Brown]

Stick to the Met Office.

[T_B]

Agreed. Met office has been pretty consistent for the Peak this past couple of months, apart from the thurs/Friday a couple of weeks ago. I don’t bother looking at others any more.

[Stuart Anderson]

Stick to the Met Office.

If I could add, not just the Met Office but their mountain forecast plus the pressure chart and rain radar are really useful.

The Norwegian site is decent too https://www.yr.no/en

[cheque]

The Met Office smartphone app is really good- lets you save locations so you can just scroll down comparing what the weather will be like at different places at the same time rather than repeatedly searching.

[T_B]

Stick to the Met Office.

If I could add, not just the Met Office but their mountain forecast plus the pressure chart and rain radar are really useful.

The Norwegian site is decent too https://www.yr.no/en

Whilst I use yr.no for other mountain areas I think it’s overly optimistic for the Peak.

[teestub]

Whilst I use yr.no for other mountain areas I think it’s overly optimistic for the Peak.

Ditto for Yorks grit areas, also never seems to pick up dankness as well as the ominous met office 20% grey cloud forecast does.

[tomtom]

I find a whatsapp network of climbers based around all major locations works far better than anything else :')

Nothing like someone looking out of the window to give an accurate account of the weather.

That said - I have on multiple occasions ignored their advice and been duly disappointed...

[lagerstarfish]

Drizzly and dank looking at Burbage not as forecast. Again. Driving on to the Tor instead

I too fell for more of the BBC's lies this morning.

I'll not be moving to less planet destroying transport to the crag until I get better conditions predictions.

(Or electric bikes get a lot cheaper)

[Johnny Brown]

Whilst I use yr.no for other mountain areas I think it’s overly optimistic for the Peak.

Ditto for Yorks grit areas, also never seems to pick up dankness as well as the ominous met office 20% grey cloud forecast does.

It was a not dissimilar classic winter high pressure gloom about fifteen years back that made me delete all the euro computer based forecasts from my bookmarks. Worthless.

Met Office, occasionally MWIS, but also keep an eye on the synoptics so you've got an idea whether the forecasting is straightforward or not and how it isn't likely to vary from the prediction.

Although the Met Office have not been properly privatised the promotion of 'competition' saw them lose their 93 year long BBC contract, which was awarded to the French and unsurprisingly the BBC forecasts are not as good. Not because they're French, because they haven't got 150 years experience of our fickle island weather.

[teestub]

What page do you use to look at the Synoptics? I know you can see the fronts on the met office vids but sure there must be a better resource.

Also in my simple mind winter highs were good news conditions wise, do they have to have moved in from the north or east to have the dry air?

[tomtom]

The high is best positioned off to one side so it brings in a bit of northerly or easterly. The last coupe we’ve had have seemed to sit over us and just lead to clag.

Personally the most useful data is rain radar - and I use an app that gives it in 5 min increments with a 5-8 min delay from real time. Scrolling back and forth to see what’s coming and from what direction is most useful (I’ve found).

[teestub]

The met office rain radar is decent too and that has high def detail for the previous 6 hrs which is super useful like you say.

[tomtom]

It’s all the same radar (there is only one network) just the number of time slices and how close to real time it is depends on how much you or your app maker pays!

I’ve a met office rant brewing so I’d better stop posting 😄

[GazM]

What page do you use to look at the Synoptics? I know you can see the fronts on the met office vids but sure there must be a better resource.

I use these. Scroll down to the '9 panel GFS' (not sure what the GFS bit means, but it's a handy view of synoptic charts.
https://www.wetterzentrale.de/

[teestub]

Cheers Gaz

Sorry for starting to get you wound up TT! Re radar just meant the past six hour data is higher def (smaller square size) than the forecast data. Like you say seeing which way systems are moving and when they have cleared certain areas is the most useful thing.

[Johnny Brown]

I view synoptics at https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/weather/maps-and-charts/surface-pressure/#?tab=surfacePressureColour

The 'proper' ones inc geostrophic winds are under the 'black and white' tab. Like Gaz, I used to use wetterzentrale to view these until the Met did a user survey and everybody complained they were having to use a german site to view them.

For radar I use the Home and Dry app, which is brilliant. This is probably my most used resource along with the met app, although the forecasting/ time projection needs a pinch of salt, especially re orographic. Or raintoday.co.uk on desktop.

Plus the sat view on https://en.sat24.com/HD/en/gb/visual - they also have an app and you can switch to infrared for night.

When my Dad was gliding a lot he used to give the overall forecast a quick glance before taking a deep dive into tephigrams aka SkewT plots - atmospheric soundings from balloon releases. They graph dewpoint with altitude and illustrate things like inversions very clearly. Not the most intuitive things but might be worth getting your head around if you were projecting somewhere particularly condensey. This met factsheet PDF is probably the best start but google is your friend.

[highrepute]

I feel like I'm missing something. But MetOffice has been as crap as everything else of late.

For example. Right now in Sheffield it says 10% chance of rain and has a white cloud.

I look out the window and it's raining. Both BBC and google have predicted rain showers.

This seems to be happening every weekend at the moment, I'm at the crag it's raining and metoffice is telling me it's 5 to 10% chance of rain.

[teestub]

Rain radar on met office showing isolated showers in Sheff area currently. I’ve always taken the 10% as it being likely to rain for 10% of that period, rather than a 10% chance of it raining.

[Johnny Brown]

For example, a 70% chance of rain represents a 7 in 10 chance that precipitation will fall at some point during that period.

[spidermonkey09]

This seems to be happening every weekend at the moment, I'm at the crag it's raining and metoffice is telling me it's 5 to 10% chance of rain.

Story of my life climbing in the Peak the last few years. Burbage is particularly prone to it I think!

 

I’ve always taken the 10% as it being likely to rain for 10% of that period, rather than a 10% chance of it raining.

I don't think this is right, even in the summer the rain likelihood is often 10% for much of the day, even on days where its abundantly clear no rain is going to fall. I  *think* this is backed up by the clarification here but my brain is mush today so cant be sure! https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/weather/guides/what-does-this-forecast-mean

[teestub]

I’m learning so much about the forecasts 😄 So their forecast is just shit then and doesn’t match the satellite data, or Highrepute is just unlucky!

[Johnny Brown]

I think the trick is not to take a football supporters approach to forecasts. If you look at a couple and they're different, rather than trying to pick a winner take the message that there is significant uncertainty. If we're a day or so ahead I'd then look at the synoptics, if it's now I don't bother with forecasts much at all and just look at radar and satellite data.