UKH

Hello,

I am a forecaster with the Met Office, and also a keen climber with many years experience of climbing and being in the hills (in all kinds of weather). One of my roles is to produce the mountain forecasts for the East and West Highlands. We are currently reviewing our mountain forecasts and as our target audience, your input and feedback would be welcome.

Sportscotland has commissioned a short survey to evaluate the provision of mountain weather forecasts for Scotland and I would be grateful if you could take the time to fill out. This survey is supported by the Met Office and other partners.
http://surveymonkey.com/s/WeathMetOffice

If you have any questions about the Met Office mountain forecasts, or any comments not covered in the survey please feel free to post here or send me a pm and I will try my best to give an answer.

Thanks for your help,

Mike Reading
Senior Operational Meteorologist
Met Office

In reply to Met Office forecaster:

Done. Keep up the good work and please split the W Highlands into Islands & NW, Lochaber, Trossachs & Argyll or similar!!

In reply to Met Office forecaster:

Done.

Can I emphasise my main comment:

"The main problem with MetOffice forecasts is the really poor website. It really is APPALLING. Unusable bad. The content is there but accessing it is kafkaesque."

In reply to BnB:

Thanks for that. I expect it might take too long to do individual forecasts for each of those regions, but splitting up the W Highlands is certainly something we can look into.

In reply to MG:

Thanks. Is it navigating through the website that is your main issue with the site?

In reply to Met Office forecaster:

I don't think I communicated my thoughts on regions very well. As a weather nerd, with a good deal of experience of Scottish mountain conditions across all seasons, I was really suggesting splitting the West into 3 sections, North (of Glen Shiel), Central (Lochaber & Skye) and South (Rannoch and Trossachs).

Of course, you could just copy MWIS and designate NW and West. However, I live on Skye and we belong to the NW MWIS forecasts, but often (usually!!) we have different weather to Torridon and points NW. Fort William likewise is on the northern edge of MWIS' West Highlands forecast which also covers the often balmier Trossachs.

I'm not accusing MWIS of serving us poorly but t seems strange that the two most popular outdoor destinations lie on the periphery of their respective regions.

In reply to Met Office forecaster:

Yes. Although to be fair having just taken a look, it has improved quite a bit recently. The mixture of old and new style pages seems at last to have gone. However, as an example, one area which is problematic is the rainfall radar. In principle this is a great resource for planning. But the way it is implemented is clunky. Even with a high-speed connection, loading the video style presentation takes a while, on a slow connection it is unusable.

From the point of view of mountain forecasting, I find these two sites both very clear and to contain the information that is needed for planning. Perhaps worth considering if you are redeveloping the MetOffice offering. The Chamonix meteo gives a good text based approach

http://chamonix-meteo.com/chamonix-mont-blanc/weather/forecast/morning/5_da...

while this Swiss site uses symbols (expand for more detail)

http://www.meteocentrale.ch/en/europe/switzerland/weather-kleines-matterhor...

In reply to MG: I can't comment on Scotland, but forecasts do seem to have greatly improved recently. Can I make a request for a return of the 5-day UK-wide weather outlook map - very useful for planning which direction to head. Or if it still exists, where is it hidden?

In reply to BnB:

Ok, I see what you are getting at. Thanks for the suggestion, I will feed it back.

In reply to MG:

Thanks for your comments and the examples. Are you aware of the summit forecasts? They have a very similar format to the Swiss site you linked. On the homepage type in the name of a summit you want a forecast for in the ‘Find a weather forecast’ box and it will give you a five day forecast in the box below. If you click on a given day it will show you a page similar to the Swiss site, e.g.
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/public/weather/forecast/gfjkts6ky#?fcTime=14338... for Derry Cairngorm.

In reply to Šljiva:

Thanks for your comments. I’m interested in feedback on mountain forecasts from all areas, not just Scotland.

The 5 day weather outlook map is still available. If you click on the UK map on the homepage, or on the ‘Get detailed forecast for ...’ below, it will give you the 5 day map where you can select the weather symbols you want in the bottom right. You can zoom out to view the whole of the UK or whichever area you want. Hope this helps.

In reply to Met Office forecaster:

Mike,
I have added my comments to the survey. Just took 5 mins.

I'll add my vote to the summit forecasts. I just discovered these by accident a while ago and the detail is really useful (eg. extra clag on the coastal summits or vice versa). Not 100% of course but a lot better than we used to have.

I agree with previous comments on the Meteo forecasts from the Alps. Maybe they have it easier there but they are admirably succinct in communicating key features of the weather.

Iain

In reply to Iain Brown:

Thanks Iain, glad you found the summit forecasts helpful.

In reply to Met Office forecaster:

I've added my thoughts to the survey, but for the record, regarding the website, I'd like to see a low bandwidth text only, or SMS service, given that the forecasts are often accessed from areas of low, intermittent or zero mobile coverage.

That said, I find the forecasts themselves excellent.

In reply to Met Office forecaster:
Done.

Why do we have mwis and met office delivering such similar products?

The most granular up to date winter weather info is available from close reading of the sais forecasts. It would be great if I could get this info on the Web or even better by text I may even consider paying for it!

In reply to Met Office forecaster:

im with some other posters the website is very poor looks dated hard to navigate around .
Also your app for my android phone was useless just kept crashing.

In reply to Met Office forecaster:

I think the forecasts are the most accurate out there, I use them for caving and climbing having tried Metcheck (Metguess) and MWIS. The website is a bit of a pain though and I dont really care about reading the description of the dales being a beautiful place with drystone walls etc, just need to know if it will rain or not. Having said that I can't find that bit anymore so maybe you got rid of it.

In reply to Met Office forecaster:

I used the met office mountain forecast a lot more this year than previous years. Almost every time I went out this year the weather was substantially better than MWIS predicted and I've found the met one a little more accurate recently, of course it could just be coincidence when I've been out and I like having the two to look at.

I also have found the website slow and difficult to navigate, judging by the other posters it seems there's lots of content there but no one can find it. At work we use xcweather or windguru and I prefer both formats to the met office because they're simple and clear to read and require very little bandwidth to download.

In reply to Met Office forecaster:

Hi Mike

Thanks for the opportunity to comment on the Met Service forecasts.

In the last 15 years since I've been living in the country the map data you provide has improved fantastically and is incredibly useful to a mountain person. The situation/surface-pressure map twice-daily sequence is my first click every day and beats having just one or two static maps of past, as you really get a feel for how the weather systems are expected to behave over the coming days.

Add to that the more recent rain forecast animation maps (which are brilliant!!!) and us amateurs can really fine tune what we think will happen and which regions we should head for.

(NOTE: The rain forecast maps would be SO MUCH BETTER if the entire 2 day sequence was updated at points throughout the day, not just the next few hours. Currently, at say 1800, we have the next few hours updated -- and at higher temporal resolution -- while from about midnight on through the next day we still see the predictions from the previous morning. The data must be there -- or could be -- but is just not rendered.)

However, while the map data is brilliant, the mountain forecast text is usually very poor (sorry). The main problem is that the style of description is inconsistent (between days) and priorities appear wrong. I don't need poetry (about clarity over distant hills or bubbling clouds or fine detail about mist on the summit of some no-name Ben-whatever that I've never heard of). Nor is it that useful when the bulk of the description is about how wonderful it will be from midnight through till daybreak, the timeframe of which often isn't clear until after a few rereads, when only the last few sentences tell the real story of rubbish weather for the daylight hours. Not many people in the UK are out climbing/walking throughout the night as in the alps. Basically, it always seems that the text descriptions are trying to put a positive spin on the often rubbish wx here.

But mountain people really do need to hear it as it is. Instead I/we need to know (pretty much in this order of priority): precipitation, wind speed, wind direction, and in winter freezing level.

Your map data mentioned above gives most of that -- all except freezing level. Your text often/usually doesn't. In fact, often your text descriptions are dangerous. Especially during winter when they might go on about brightness and air clarity or something and give the false impression of a nice-ish day, yet I've already seen the zillion 1mm spaced contours on the surface pressure maps and think it will be 100mph winds!!! Somewhere later down in some icon or something it might mention almost as an afterthought, storm force winds.

So now I do not read the text! Occasionally, I will skim it briefly as a final step to see if it will help confirm what I think from the map data, or if the map data is confusing, or if I am desperate to imagine better wx than the maps predict. I don't look at all the modern icons either.

As mentioned in posts above, the Chamonix Meteo text forecasts are *really* good. They simply call it as it is. That is what mountain people need. Save the optimism and poetry for the city forecasts.

Other text-based services such as MWIS and the Outdoor Conditions forecast on BBC Radio Scotland have the same problems. So I don't bother with them either and go to your site for the forecast. Because you have the map data -- the real forecast. If your text forecasts could be more like the Chamonix Meteo ones, you would have a world class mountain weather service.

Sorry for the hard punches. But for mountain weather, that is what we need to hear -- how it really is!

Thanks again.
Bruce

In reply to Met Office forecaster:

In addition to the above, I find the "detailed" mountain forecast on your site only goes 1 day ahead, after that it's very brief overviews. I think MWIS does a better job of trying to forecast as best they can, using keywords such as "low confidence" if they don't know, rather than summarising each day in 1-2 sentences.

FWIW I tend to use MWIS (which does seem to be a little pessimistic) combined with their surface pressure charts (I think they derive from wetter.de).

It would be really nice to combine a surface pressure map with the mountain forecasts on the same screen!

In reply to BruceM:

Hi Bruce,

Thank you for your comments. No need to apologise, this sort of feedback is very useful. Plus as forecasters we tend to develop thick skins!

I am glad you find the animation maps useful. In answer to your query about updating the rainfall map, the one hour time steps are generated using a process called nowcasting. This uses the data from the latest rain radar to plot the first frame, then gradually merges it into the model data as you step through the next six hours. After that the maps reverts to model data. The nowcast data is generated every hour for the next six hours (it takes around half an hour or so to populate the data, so for example the 18:00 update would be available sometime after 18:30). Therefore there isn’t any extra data. Hope this makes sense.

Regarding the text; wind and freezing level are always mentioned. They are given their own paragraphs for days one and two, while the precipitation is described in the overview paragraph at the top of the page and also in symbol form for the first day.

When there is severe weather expected this should also be highlighted in the overview at the top. We certainly don’t try to put an optimistic spin on the weather, but will try to highlight where we think the best/worst conditions are likely to be. I do however appreciate your comments about keeping the text more succinct and will feed this back.

Thanks again for your comments, your feedback is much appreciated.

Mike

In reply to Met Office forecaster:

Thanks very much for your reply Mike. Very useful!

That's interesting about the two systems used to create the rain forecast maps. The Nowcasting short-term vs the primary model for the longer term. (I went away and read up on them.) So I see there are limitations. We should just be very grateful for what we have. Which we are!

After I made those comments about the descriptive summary texts I noticed that they (West Highlands anyway) have actually been quite good -- more like what I would want. So I was feeling the goose! And perhaps it is a case of being put off by the "bad apples" of past that seem to dominate. Yes, appreciate that the winds and temps are listed further down in their own sections. It was just the descriptive summary I was meaning. But yes, keeping that summary succinct, headlining the key features, and no "poetry", would keep the geese happy

Thanks again for feeding back our comments to your team. And appreciate your time and the information you've provided here.

All the best
Bruce

ps. I suppose nobody above has asked yet so I will: if you and the team could also just do whatever it takes to sync-up those Highs passing over the UK with the weekends, we would be forever grateful and probably do whatever you asked of us

In reply to Met Office forecaster:

Thanks for asking for feedback on the forums it's really appreciated. I will fill in the survey but have a couple of points which I don't think have been said before:

1. Please, please, please could you give a clear indication of your confidence with all your forecasts (not just the mountain ones). It would make it much less irritating when planning a weekend summer or winter climbing if i knew roughly how likely it is that you thought the forecast would change once we get closer to the weekend (MWIS seem generally better at this but still not as good as they could be). I have mentioned this to an employee friend at the met office who said it would be feasible. I don't know whether you're worried about the general public being too ill-informed to understand probability.

2. I don't understand why the local forecast so often seems different to the mountain one. I lived in north Wales for a couple of years and began ignoring the mountain forecast and just using the Llanberis or Ogwen one as they seemed more reliable.

Thanks
Sam