Somewhere up north, it’s raining (From Craven Herald)

Somewhere up north, it’s raining

3:42pm Sunday 10th August 2008

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As I write this, the rain is lashing down on my skylight window so hard that the whole roof is shaking.

Nothing new about that this summer - except I was expecting to spend the morning in my allotment because the weather forecast predicted this was to be a rare fine day.

Now English people complaining about the weather no doubt goes back to the days when we lived in caves, but forecasts - and particularly national forecasts on radio or TV - are a relatively new phenomenon and, only a few months ago, the meteorologists were bragging about a new, multi-million-pound computer which would usher in a brave new world of accurate forecasts.

Ha, ha. English stoicism finally cracked last weekend when local authorities in the tourist honey pots of the West Country issued official complaints about the inaccuracy of BBC weather forecasts which, they said, were predicting doom and gloom when in fact they were experiencing a wonderful sunny summer.

This, they said, was affecting the vital tourist trade, deflecting visitors at a crucial time when many millions had decided to stay at home this year rather than go abroad for their annual holidays because of the credit crunch and the fall of the pound against the Euro.

Now I have heard these concerns repeated ad nauseam in the Yorkshire Dales and the Lake District for years. And personal experience last week merely confirmed these suspicions. Because the forecast was occasional showers with sunny periods, we took four days off - and spent virtually all of it with rain hammering down.

This was not stair-rods, but virtual cataracts, flooding the roads in minutes and turning the rivers into unfishable torrents the colour of milk chocolate.

Yet, on television, people in short sleeves were watching England's cricketers get hammered by the South Africans in Birmingham.

And that seems to me to be the problem. The weather over the British Isles is incredibly mixed and we can't blame the meteorologists for that.

But, only a few weeks ago, I wrote about the BBC's "London-centric" attitude which had upset even its own directors: too much attention was paid to the South East, they said, and the North of England might not even exist in the eyes of many programmers.

This, I believe, also applies to BBC weather forecasts, or at least the so-called "national" ones. They don't care if our woad runs in the rain - they still think we paint ourselves blue, you see - so long as they take a brolly on the way to the tube.

If the scientists now say they can track global warming (although there hasn't been any since 1998) surely they can forecast the difference between a monsoon and sunny spells north of the Humber?

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