The Met Office is to lean into one of Britain’s favourite pastimes – talking about the weather – by launching a new two-week forecast.
At present, the publicly funded weather and climate service offers a seven-day forecast on its website and app with an hourly breakdown for the first five days and then a three-hourly breakdown for the final two days.
On Friday, it emerged the Met Office is to extend its forecasts for rainfall, wind speed and temperatures into a second week. A statement from the Met Office said: “Fourteen-day forecasts are coming to the Met Office web and app in the coming months.
“Recent research has highlighted how a probabilistic approach to forecasting could be beneficial for forecasts, particularly at this range, and better inform public decision-making around the weather.
“We’re exploring how we can use this approach to provide 14-day forecasts via the web and app in the coming months.
“We’re already communicating this approach to forecasts in our presented videos on YouTube via Deep Dive or on 10-day trend.
“Developing communication of the forecast in this way is part of our role as the UK’s national weather forecaster, innovating weather science to help people to make better decisions to stay safe and thrive.”
Many weather apps and websites already offer a forecast for two weeks or more but the Met Office has until now refrained owing to challenges around accuracy.
But new Met Office research has concluded that probability-based forecasts can better inform weather-based decision-making.
Author of the new research, the Met Office science fellow Ken Mylne, said: “Most previous discussions on expressing probabilities in forecasts started from an assumption that they can be hard for people to understand and that expressing uncertainty could undermine people’s confidence in the forecast and therefore undermine their ability to make decisions.
“However, this research suggests that this assumption is wrong. People can understand probabilistic forecasts and could indeed find it more useful for informing weather-based decisions.”
Last October, the BBC announced it was to reunite with the Met Office for its weather forecasts and climate updates, eight years after the relationship between the two organisations ended.
Artificial intelligence is now being used to develop advanced forecasting models aimed at producing weather outlooks faster and further into the future.
Earlier this week, the tech company Nvidia announced its Earth-2 weather forecasting models, which it claimed will make forecasting faster and more accurate.
In December 2024, Google DeepMind said its AI weather program performed up to 20% better than the ENS forecast from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts.
