The New ITV & BBC Weather Thread

You're clearly not an SSE customer

I see despite part of the BBC being based up north, the London bias continues when it comes to reporting snow.

Nothing on the One o’clock news, nothing at all on the BBC News website despite “parts of the UK” being heavily disrupted this morning due to heavy snowfall.

The snow in Yorkshire was reported during the BBC News simulcast on BBC2 with a live from Keighley.

I found it somewhat ironic that we here in Liverpool had to put up with "red alert" wall-to-wall coverage of last week's snow that didn't really affect us; yet this morning I awoke to what is for us a rather severe covering that was completely unexpected and resulted in my commute taking three times longer than it should. In fact it took one colleague of mine 1 hour and 45 minutes to do what would ordinarily be a 10 minute journey. I believe the first mention of it was on the late North West Tonight weather bulletin last night which, for most people, is frankly a bit late. I went to bed last night with absolutely no idea about what was to hit us this morning. I understand that weather forecasting is difficult and often unpredictable but surely they should have some sort of idea within 24 hours whether snow is likely in the general area? I have to say a lot of people here were extremely annoyed with the lack of notice.

Question, if the UK Met office issue a colour coded warning, can the Meteo group disagree with it and issue their own warning level instead? Say for example the Met Office issue a red warning for Cornwall but Meteo reckon it's only Amber warning worthy. Could this cause a clash of forecasting between the BBC and ITV?

No, they report the Met Office alerts which includes the colour. It could in theory lead to an absurd situation where they present a Meteo forecast for baking sun, followed by a Met Office warning for heavy snow, but it's unlikely that the two forecasting models would ever be so dramatically different.

I think the Met Office as a government agency are the only group authorised to issue weather warnings for the UK. The government has a responsibility to inform the population and I imagine that they consider the Met Office the "single source of truth" which is reported consistently through the BBC and other broadcasters.

There is an argument that using multiple agencies could add accuracy but that adds a significant risk of confusion if different groups report different things. Using a single (very credible - a world class) agency balances consistency with accuracy.

MeteoGroup issue their own warnings on their WeatherPro app which do vary quite a bit from the Met Office warnings. I find they tend to be more frequent, have a lower threshold of severity and have additional categories such as 'low temperature warning'.

Anyone can issue a warning about the weather. I'm not sure if the Met Office ones are considered 'offiical' in some way though.

Well, going by recent the Irish example Met Eireann warnings are taken very seriously and can cause shutdown of all public services. We are lucky in that the forecasters making the calls are well known personalities to the Irish public as they are the ones standing in front of a weather map after the news.
So in order for the UK government to make decisions in the interests of public safety I would imagine they would go with their met office.

Just a footnote to all this BBC/Meteo stuff - I've found their forecasts on their app and website to be wrong more often than not.

Me too, the accuracy has dramatically reduced since the switch. I've even had the app reporting completely different (heavy snow vs light cloud) in places a mile apart.

It’s the same here. US stations do stupid brandings like First Alert and Severe Weather Days. They’ll put it out in advance just saying becareful and mindful.