UK Met Office FAIL. Again!

On Wednesday, 13^th August, about 15:00, a thunderstorm passed over where I live. Many of us in the Godalming and Ash area will have heard it, and some of us may have seen flashes of lightning. As it happened, I was looking at the Met Office website at the time. There was no “yellow warning,” no indication that anything out of the ordinary was expected. Indeed, the short-term “forecast” showed no rain in the area at all.

The Met Office has habitually given “yellow” thunderstorm warnings at the slightest excuse. Back in 2023, I monitored their performance over the summer. Unfortunately, I did not document my findings formally. But my recollection is that, of 20 warnings they issued for our area over several months, only two actually produced thunderstorms that hit Godalming. And there were two more occasions, where they didn’t give any warning, but thunderstorms hit us anyway. I put that as a success rate of 9% (2 out of 22). Not fit for any purpose.

Anyway, here’s my screen dump of where I came in, a snapshot of the Met Office’s observational record at 15:00 (taken at 15:11):

Which shows that at that time, a thunderstorm was indeed passing just to the east of Godalming. Being the cynic I am, I immediately thought: what does the Met Office’s next forecast say?

Oops. Nothing like what was actually happening. Met Office FAIL! Now, I took this snap at 15:13, though I don’t have hard evidence of that because Microsoft have, conveniently, removed the timestamp.

At 15:20, I went back to the “forecast” for 15:15. Guess what I saw?

Oh-ho. Seven minutes earlier, at 15:13, the forecast for 15:15 had shown no rain anywhere near me. Now, after the fact, it was showing that they had forecast this area of rain all along! That was, to say the least, not very good science.

And what, eventually, was the observation at 15:15 (which I captured at 15:27)?

All this was dishonesty by the Met Office, if not also incompetence. And if we can’t trust them to predict the weather even a few minutes out, how can we possibly trust them to predict “climate change” in the future?

I rest my case, for now. But it’s a damning one.