French Meteo

[Mayennaise]

I regularly use the above site to check the forecast as it is usually pretty accurate but can anyone tell me what the red bracketed figures are after the white wind speed figures?

[cooperlola]

Deleted.

Edit : Just looked, Benjamin is right.

[Benjamin]

If you hover over the wind speed figures the red reading is listed as vitesse en rafale which I think translates in English as gusting up to so the red figure should always be higher than the white figure.

[Maricopa]

Benjamin, you are quite correct, the figure in Red is the max expected "gust" speed.

[Michael]

Have your kites ready for tomorrow. [:D]

[Ford Anglia]

I sincerely hope the French meteo is better than the met-office UK.

On Friday last week I checked the weather between North Lincs and Chorley in Lancs, as I was acoompanying my 18 year old across the pennines via the M62, to buy a new car. With him driving, the possible weather over Saddleworth Moor worried me.

The metoffice gave fluffy cloud and sunshine, ALL DAY SATURDAY.

What we ACTUALLY got was rain, strong winds, fog/low cloud, and spray, spray, spray...........

TBH, the metoffice are thieves. They ought not to be paid for such poor service.

[Deimos]

The wonderful about the various weather forecasts at the moment (i.e. over the last year or so) is that you can really chose your weather.  If it look rainy and miserable in Meteo France, then try Meteocheck or the Weather Channel or Meteo consult.  It is bound to be sunny and dry on one or more (with everything in-between on the different ones)

They do seem to have great difficulty in getting a consistent forecast between the different providers - even for short term (later today or tomorrow).

Ian

[cooperlola]

Personally, I prefer to watch "Meteo" where I can look at all the weather maps and satelite photos, to see how the forecasts are worked out and why they think what is going to happen, is. (And I think Louis is cute...[Www])  It's nice to find a weather forecast where isobars are shown and the viewer isn't treated like an idiot too (unlike some of the forecasts on the UK channels where they are dumbed down and squeezed into a 30 second slot at best.)

[Deimos]

I tend to look at http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/weather/europe/surface_pressure.html (updates 8:30 am each day) - as it covers Europe not just the UK.  When (some) start forecasting rain one can normally verify if it is actually going to happen in the next few hours by checking http://www.meteox.com/h.aspx?r=&soort=loop3uur&URL - and it is surprising how often they forecast showers or rain and you can see that there is none around or what there is is going to miss you completely.  I have found some of the UK sites (e.g. Accuweather) just totally inaccurate (I assume there is somewhere called France south of the equator because they cannot be talking about the same France I live in).  I do find the Weather Channel (http://uk.weather.com/weather/local/FRXX0048 for Le Mans) quite good/accurate (same forecast as the .fr version - just presented in a different layout and the .uk one allows you to see greater detail).

Ian

[Ford Anglia]

I actually e-mailed the UK metoffice in a rage when they forecast bright intervals, no rain, one day, but it turned out rainy.

What really moved me to anger was that in the meantime they had changed the forecast to match what was happening!

Their response: basically, it boiled down to: "weather changes, so do we".

Theives, I say, theives............[:@]

[Kitty]

This is where to go and then you can do you own forecasting for the next 5 days.  I look every day.  Pressure charts are what meterologists use any way.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/weather/coast/pressure/