UKC

Is it just me, or is the Met Office mountain forecast seriously forked up today? 

The Grampian forecast is showing what looks like today’s weather -Saturday 23 November - under the heading of Friday 22 November. It says “Updated at: 03:42 (UTC) on Sat 23 Nov 2024”. 
 

The printable version is even more confused. Under the heading of Friday 22 November, “Forecast Issued on Friday 22 Nov 2024 at 03:45 by Met Office Aberdeen”, it shows what looks like Saturday’s heavy snow with Friday’s light winds and cold temperatures. 
 

I’ll post screenshots in a few minutes. 
 

Web forecast captured at 12:33 Saturday 23rd:

Followed by printable forecast. 

Edited to add: I phoned the Met Office about it at 12:55 Saturday... let's see if they can fix it quick!

Remember a few months back when it was a bit windy out!

It seems they updated it at 13:50. The printable (PDF) version looks correct now.
On the HTML version, the forecast for “this evening” is for yesterday evening, but otherwise the dates match up with the forecast correctly. 

 

A few years ago the dates on the forecasts all referred to something like the 18th century!

A bad mistake! Easy to spot, though. Same for Petegunn's 9121mph winds.

I was horrified to see a forecast with Saturday's date showing Friday's forecast.  Friday had light north-westerlies, today (Saturday) had 90mph south-easterlies. People could have chosen mountaineering objectives based on completely misleading information.  

It's concerning that such an error is possible for our national weather service.  Imagine the chaos if they published a weather warning showing the wrong date.

I've had a similar experiences with the Met Office API. The forecast for some locations has been way out on occasions - Cairn Gorm and Aonach Mor being repeat offenders with temperatures several degrees wrong.

In fairness to the Met Office they have eventually fixed issues when I've raised them, but this was one of the reasons I decided to switch to a new weather provider this season for a climbing weather app I run.