An experiment

It has become my practice, when going away, to look up the weather forecast for the area we are visiting. The forthcoming trip is no different, except that I decided I would make this an opportunity to conduct a small experiment.

My usual forecast site is accuweather.com as they seem to be the only weather forecasters who are will to predict more than about three days ahead. However, on this occasion I have also printed off the forecasts from the BBC, the Meteorological Office, and (two I've never heard of before) Metcheck.com and weather.co.uk. They all predict roughly the same weather, but use slightly different words - sunny intervals, sunny spells, partly cloudy etc. The cynic in me wonders if some of the sites just copy another's forecast but change things slightly to avoid charges of plagiarism or copyright. Here is the forecast for Monday, 22 September:

	Accuweather	BBC	Met Office
High temp	14	17	17
Weather	Sunny periods	Sunny intervals	Cloudy with some sun
Wind	NNE, 6km/h	NNE, 3mph	NNE, 3mph

All three predict NIL rainfall, so the only difference is in the high temperature. But how accurate are they? Well, that will be the subject of my experiment.

I suppose all forecasters have equipment a little more sophisticated than mine. A few years ago, the OB and I visited New England and we spent time at Strawberry Bank, a restoration/reconstruction of a historic settlement at Portsmouth, NH. One of the stores sold tourist trash (naturally) and we bought a weather stick. Actually, we bought two. These are reputed to have been discovered by the local Indians and are, we were told, surprisingly accurate at forecasting the weather, even if it is little more than 'wet' or 'dry'. The stick is about a foot in length, less than a pencil's thickness, and has been cut from a bush or tree, complete with a little of the trunk (or thicker branch) which forms a base for the whole to be attached to an outside wall. The stick then bends up if the weather will be fine, or down if rain is in the offing. I'm not sure what happens if the stick is fixed upside down.

Yeah, well, it gives us a laugh.