Hi

This is my quirky way of looking at the disparity that I think exists in forecasting extreme weather events by the BBC. It takes the form of a comparison of maximum day time temperatures and their anomalies at Heathrow and Dunkeswell in Devon for the month of July so far.

I had no problem finding stats for Heathrow from the Met Office site, but I had to turn to a very useful site in Spain to get climate data for Dunkeswell. The upshot was that I calculated a mean max for July for both places (1991-2012), so now I had to turn to Florida State University for SYNOP data to get the max temps for 1800 UTC for each day of this month to construct my anomalies table:

06-18 Maximum 06-18 Anomaly Hot spot
03772 03840 03772 03840 Score

July 1 21.3 17.9 -2.1 -1.5 0 - 1
July 2 17.9 14.1 -5.5 -5.3 0 - 2
July 3 21.5 17.5 -1.9 -1.9 ½ - 2½
July 4 24.9 20.1 +1.5 +0.7 1½ - 2½
July 5 26.3 21.2 +2.9 +1.8 2½ - 2½
July 6 28.1 24.1 +4.7 +4.7 3 - 3
July 7 29.5 25.2 +6.1 +5.8 4 - 3
July 8 27.7 25.4 +4.3 +6.0 4 - 4
July 9 27.2 24.7 +3.8 +5.3 4 - 5
July 10 24.6 24.9 +1.2 +5.5 4 - 6
July 11 23.4 21.4 +0.0 +2.0 4 - 7
July 12 25.9 24.5 +2.5 +5.1 4 - 8
July 13 31.4 28.8 +8.0 +9.4 4 - 9
July 14 29.8 28.9 +6.4 +9.5 4 - 10
July 15 30.9 26.8 +7.5 +7.4 5 - 10
July 16 31.0 27.7 +7.6 +8.3 5 - 11
July 17 31.9 27.7 +8.4 +8.3 6 - 11
July 18 29.5 28.1 +6.1 +8.7 6 - 12
July 19 29.3 26.9 +5.9 +7.5 6 - 13

Admittedly you have to take into account the population of the two regions:

SE England = 8.6 million (1)
SW England = 5.2 million (2)

These figures were a bit surprising, I thought the population of London was as high as this (I'm sure someone will enlightenment me).

And also the fact that the National weather forecast for the BBC all come out of London - and hence most of the presenters live there.

It is quite clear from this table that the focus of the heat of the last couple of weeks has been as much in the SW as the SE, and lowly Dunkewsell has more that matched and for most part beaten the anomalies from the king of the hot spots. In no way has this been reflected in the forecast coming out from the BBC, and it's only with a marked reluctance do you get phrases that the "focus of the heat has switched".

What we see is not that surprising we all stick up for the place and region that we see as home - it's only natural - in fact I'm doing this very thing with this post. The point is the national weather forecast should be above all this built in bias that we all have for where we currently live - it should just present the science, a mix of climatology, observational and the latest NWP forecast not just for the place where the highest temperatures occur.

All I can say is thank God that the North Sea has redressed the thermal balance - at least for this weekend.

Bruce.

(1) http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/mro/ne...astnr0712.html
(2) http://www.swo.org.uk/census-2011/po.../#.Ueo_5I3VB8E