So I am currently away on a short break in Copenhagen. Over the last couple of weeks I have been avidly been checking the weather situation on my iPhone app. Until a few days ago it was predicting sunshine for the two days but the closer we got to the time of departure the worse the forecast got. So just before we flew on Friday morning the prediction was for near constant rain fall for the whole weekend. Of course, we therefore planned accordingly, out went the suntan cream and sun glasses and in went the coats and umbrellas. And what happened? It has been so sunny that both Helen and I now literally have red faces from where we caught the sun!
What is the moral of this tale? Something that I have been saying for a long time – never trust the weather forecast and if you want to know what the weather is going to be like stick your head out of the window and take a look!
What is quite fascinating about this is that in other areas of science and technology there have been huge advances but in weather forecasting it still seems about as accurate as it did 10, 20 years ago. And this is in spite of huge investments in technology, such as the Cray-1, to analyse increasingly larger amounts of data collected from ground stations to satellites. It would seem that mother nature is still one step ahead of the weather forecasters!