Another day, another weather forecast
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And another arbitrary time on which to stop the weather maps. I rarely watch television at all, but when I do, I usually watch the news. It's what happens to be on while I'm eating, which is about the only time I spend in the living room where the television is. But I digress. A section of the programme is always dedicated to the weather, covering what it has been, what it is and what it might be if some boffins managed to guess right.
Having a weather forecast is great, especially if it's accurate. Granted, that's not always the case. Sometimes it just gives you hope. But even its inaccuracies have some benefits. It gives you someone else to blame if you don't wear a coat or leave an umbrella at home. You may end up soaked to the bone in your favourite T-shirt, but if anyone asks why you ignored the big grey clouds, you can somehow avoid being thought of as a complete pillock simply by beginning your riposte with "the forecast said…".
But it's the maps that I don't get. I watch the news and weather on the BBC (largely because the other channels irritate me either for the quantity of adverts or the way everything is dumbed down so much). Each day, they show a map of the UK (or a region if you watch the local news). The map is animated and changes to show the progress of the weather, hour by hour. They always stop it at two times—one very early in the morning and one during the afternoon. The times can vary, but I've never seen the logic for the times that are chosen.
The times are usually between 0500 and 0700 in the morning and 1500 or 1600 in the afternoon. Each time the map stops, the presenter will deliver their forecast for the whole country / region, and then the map will continue ticking away the hours again. But I don't understand why those times are chosen. It's not like they're the peak highs or lows, which I would expect to be earlier or later respectively, or of any other relevance.
The thing is, most people who are watching the weather programme are unlikely to care what the weather is doing at the times the presenters stop the forecast maps. While beneficial to some, the majority of the population work between the hours of 0900 and 1700 and will be travelling to or from their place of work at either end of that range. Wouldn't it be more logical, and more useful, to stop the map at 1700 to say, "as soon as you walk out that door, you're going to get wet"?
Perhaps it's a 'get out of jail free' card for the presenters. If they stop the maps at useful times, viewers will pay more attention. Those extra couple of hours on the arbitrary times allow for some ambiguity that might just help the presenters dodge a portion of the blame. To be honest, it doesn't bother me that much anyway. It's more a puzzlement than a frustration. At the end of the day, I live in the UK and all the weather forecast really tells me is that tomorrow I’m in for a severe dose of 'mild'.