Help us! Met Office calls on army of garden forecasters

At last, summer looks like it’s brightening up

THOUSANDS of amateur weather watchers are being called on to install miniature meteorological stations in their gardens to help the Met Office provide better forecasts.

The Met Office has built one of the world’s most technologically advanced forecasting supercomputers that can carry out 16,000trillion calculations a second.

But it is hindered by a lack of information and forecasters are now turning to the public for help. ‘We are lucky the UK is a country where a lot of people are very interested in the weather – so they should be on our side to get as much data as possible,’ Simon Partridge, a Met Office forecaster, said.

‘It’s a similar scheme to weather watchers on the BBC (where members of the public send in pictures of their local weather), but we get data rather than just photographs. The better data you put in, the bet- ter data you get out.’ The Met Office’s computer divides the British Isles and surrounding waters into 500,000 grid points of just under a square mile each – but it has only 500 weather stations gathering information.

So now forecasters are asking people to invest in small monitoring devices to help fill the gaps and feed extra data to the central com- puter. They hope that expanding this network across the country will help to detect local events such as thunderstorms and torrential rains where storm clouds can be confined to one or two grids.

This would allow them to issue earlier warnings about sudden, extreme weather such as heavy snow or flash flooding.

‘It is not 100 per cent reliable but it provides a good snapshot of what is going on around the country,’ Mr Partridge said. ‘Anything that looks too extreme is rejected.’

Amateur climatologist David King, 76, started monitoring the weather over 40 years ago as a hobby, fascinated by how the climate affected river levels.

Although he now prefers to ‘read the environment’ around him to predict the weather, he has invested more than £1,000 in a weather station which he uses to feed into the Met Office.

Mr King, from Kent, said: ‘It’s a great idea, the more people that get involved the more accurate the forecasts will be and the better the impact. And let’s face it, they could do with the help.’

The Met Office – frequently under fire for its inaccurate weather reports – hopes extra data will help to provide more reliable predictions of events like the torrential rain that blighted June. Floods caught the south-east of England off guard and caused chaos on the roads and railway networks.

The forecasters, who also use satellite images and ocean weather buoys, will this week reveal plans to add wireless communication data from commercial aeroplanes.

They will be able to use aircraft position and speed to calculate high-level wind patterns.

The Met Office launches its campaign for amateur weather watchers this week at the Royal Society’s Summer Science Exhibition.