#78 Weather Forecasts

When you are travelling anywhere the weather is imperative. Not only does it affect what activities you engage in, or what sights you see, it also means feeling miserable when you are either wet/cold/sunburnt. Plus your pictures will almost certainly turn out awful, grey skies make even the nicest view look dull, and you'll probably not be in picture perfect mode either.

Of course it's unavoidable and unfortunate if it happens to be raining or in the middle of a heatwave when you arrive at your target destination - but planning is also vital. For some countries, the weather can be anticipated depending on what season you go. So for example, if travelling to Sweden in Winter you can assume it will be snowing and very cold, or if you go to Japan in the Summer, you can expect it to be very, very hot. But for some countries, like Ireland, the weather can be hard to predict regardless of season.

Out of habit, the national weather services are always where I would go to for the most accurate and trustworthy weather information on a country. I am wary of the internet and it's vast amounts of wisdom, and I guess that the national website will probably be the most detailed and reliable.

However, in Ireland The Irish Meteorological Service (Met Eireann) website is something that has been annoying me for quite a while. While many national weather service websites are helpful and detailed, this website provides you with as little information as possible. It is irritatingly vague in comparison to many other websites of this kind.

For example, if I go to the Met Eireann website and look at forecasts for the Dublin area, it will tell me that today it will be raining, and the same for tomorrow.

Photo: Vague information on the Met.ie website

If you type the words 'Dublin forecast' or something similar into Google, you get a combined result from different weather websites. This gives you a much more detailed breakdown of the expected temperature, wind and rain for 3 hour intervals.

Photo: Detailed weather breakdown from Google

Comparing the Met.ie website versus the information from Google, you see quite a difference. Met has told us that it will be raining today. If you go to Google though, it tells us that there is only a 10% chance of rain for late afternoon, and 0% chance of rain for the night.

Wondering what the weather is like in Stockholm? Let's check the SMHI, Sweden's Meteorological service: 

From this you can see the website is available in both English and Swedish - and is also quite detailed - giving you information for every few hours. 

Similarly, the JMA, Japan's Meteorological service, has detailed information in both Japanese and English about the weather, as well as earthquake and tsunami information.

JMA website

Met Eireann give more detailed weather information after the 9pm news on our national tv station, RTÉ. I can't see why this information can't be put on the website too. When I was in Sweden I had no TV, and I couldn't figure how to make mine work properly in Japan. Providing weather information once a day via television is simply not a feasible idea, and Met Eireann have to update their website in keeping with the needs of both the Irish people and visitors to Ireland.