Does anyone know of a weather forecast site that let's you plug in locations consecutive dates (14-16 days) to be able to see what sort of weather might lie ahead on a trip?
I'm starting the Best of England tour on Tuesday and would like to plug in the tour itinerary and be able to see a weather forecast for the entire two weeks.
I recognize the limitation of future forecasts. Still, something is often better than nothing.
I'll check out the BBC site.
Haven’t experienced the accuracy, our trip is upcoming, but try this :)
The BBC recently changed their weather provider from the Met Office to Meteo Group and as a result, their weather is less accurate based on my experience of being away for the last fortnight, which was particularly inaccurate for wind speeds compared to the Met Office.
Use metoffice.gov.uk and plug in the towns you are visiting. They only predict a week ahead, as anything else is pointless. Anything more than a couple of days is pointless really! Last week was much windier than usual and colder than average. This week is warmer than average for this time of year! Expect a bit of everything. They are predicting rain next week as the remnants of various tropical storms and hurricanes from across the pond arrive here.
That's interesting, Jennifer. On my trip this year I noticed considerable variation in the forecasts on metoffice.gov.uk and bbc.co.uk. Now I know what was going on. I can't say I paid any attention to which was more accurate.
In my experience forecasters are much better at predicting temperature than precipitation. I've learned it is highly risky to head out without rain gear of some sort, no matter what the sky looks like and no matter what the forecast says. That's true not just in the UK but also along the western coast of France and the northern coast of Spain.
Forecasting for the UK is notoriously difficult. I can't recall the number of occasions I've sat at my computer looking at a forecast that is completely at odds with what is happening outside my window. The weather here is so unpredictable it's one of the reason's we're so obsessed with it.
I use the AccuWeather app. But.....as has been stated, predicting UK weather days ahead is not to easy.
Hi Eric -
Following some advice when ski-ing in France we always check the Norwegian Weather Forecast site, even for Britain. Not ever really tried it for long range forecasting but on a day to day, hour by hour, forecast, even for cities/places in Britain, it’s really accurate and better than anything else we’ve found.
Try: www.yr.no
Go figure! I suppose as most of what passes over Britain is headed their way, they have a vested interest!
Fingers crossed you get decent weather for your trip.
Ian
I guess I still I haven't found what I'd hoped for. I'm hoping for a 14 day (or so) future forecast for different cities, all on one page. In other words September 16-19 in Bath; September 20-22 in Stow on the Wold; September 23-24 in Conwy, etc.
Forget for the moment the likely accuracy of the forecast, I'm just looking for a website that can present the forecast in a format described above. Somebody must do it.
I don't think I have ever seen such a page. Most people want the detail about the one place they are going, then put in a different place for the same thing.
How would the webpage know which 10 places you want to know about - or 3 or 5? And that they would match the next person's list of 10 or 5 or 3?
I would tell it which cities on which dates. It's all stuff you can do now but you have to look up each place individually on whatever weather app you're using.
Great Britain plus Ireland is one of the most difficult places in the world for medium and long term weather forecasting, if not the most difficult. It can be influenced by any one of six very different air masses, sometimes more than one. Autumn is particularly difficult as the remnants of hurricanes can provide a lot of energy into the North Atlantic that can easily perturb the jet stream completely from a hitherto set pattern.
The city forecasts are automatically produced by computer based on a particular model with no human intervention. The Met Office generally favours its own model whereas other providers may be working from something else. Go out a few days and they can be completely different, although if the models converge they will be similar.
Accuracy of forecasts can mean different things. Taking an example I knew I had to be out last Wednesday morning, and when I glanced at the forecast about five days before it suggested it would be damp then for a few hours. In the end it was dry - but it was damp about 4 hours earlier overnight. Whether that was good or bad depends on how you looks at it (forecasts each day put the wet spell a bit earlier, and the one 24 hours out was spot on).
Watch the forecast at 21:55 on the BBC News Channel - this covers the week ahead, and will give the confidence level, to the extent of sometimes two different scenarios from models.
