meteorological office?

Question

what use is the meteorlogical office. They spend millions on sattelites and other equipment and very rarely get the forcast right.Apparantly during the war they rang Truro then Bristol then Oxford. They found out what the weather and wind direction was and knew within a few hours what the weather was going to be on the East coast. Weather forcasting today
is no more accurate than then.Why do we spend all this money?

Answer 1

I can't speak for your weather service but here they are many times better and correct more often than even a few years past. Maybe it's the computer models they are using to develop the forecast!

Answer 2

Weather forecasting accuracy has jumped significantly in the last 30 years. For example, just 10 years ago, a 3 to 5 day forecast was accurate 30-35% of the time. Now it's about 60%.

Another example is; tornado warnings can give as much as a 25 minute lead time, whereas 15 years ago you were lucky to get 5 minutes.

None of this would be possible without the research and equipment that they money is being spent on.

Answer 3

You sound like you're in the UK, and I think that may be the reason. The fact is most countries are not investing ENOUGH in meteorolgy. The atmosphere is so vast and the biggest problem is there are not enough upper air observations (balloon launches) or surface stations to ingest enough data into the computer models for accurate forecasts.

In the U.S. way more money has been invested in this, and here we have noticed a lot more improvement in forecasts. We have the densest data sets of any nation, and this helps forecasts get more accurate. There are also a lot of computer models here where other countries are lucky to have 1 or 2. When there are more models to depend on, you can get a better idea of what the atmosphere is going to do.

Outside of the U.S. there simply isn't enough money spent to get the data to people to interpret it. It's like asking them to look at the sky and have them tell you what its going to be like 2 months from now. Its just not going to happen without more science behind it.