There is a 10ºC temperature difference between BBC Weather forecasts and local weather stations. Why the difference and which one is correct?
Here, on holiday in Begur, on the Costa Brava (northern coast of Catalonia), there has been one sunny day after another and the weather is warm, to put it mildly. In fact, the temperature has been perfectly bearable until yesterday, when it was too hot for my liking, but at least the mercury drops enough at night to sleep comfortably with just a fan.
When the days get very hot you have to pay attention to the weather forecast to make your daily plans, especially if you have children. So I checked my premium (paid) weather app called Weather Radar, a German product, and was concerned to see today’s temperature forecast for the mid-thirties, and a similar story for the rest of the week. In my opinion, anything above 35°C starts to get uncomfortably hot.
So I checked BBC time, and found an even more extreme image there, saying that today it will reach a maximum of 39ºC at 3 in the afternoon, and that it is already 35º, which is clearly not the case if you go out. I finally checked it Time.cat, the official weather channel of the Generalitat of Catalonia, which tells a different story with temperatures around 10ºC lower than the BBC and my German weather app. The native weather application for iPhone also coincides with Meteo.cat’s forecasts that temperatures will drop by about 10ºC.
10ºC is a huge difference and would be enough to consider canceling a vacation. Why go anywhere if it’s forecast to be unbearably hot outside?
Unfortunately I don’t have a weather thermometer to check the temperature myself, but it seems that the Meteo.cat figures are correct. It’s hot, but not unbearably hot most days. The 39ºC predicted by the BBC would feel much worse.
I have no idea why the BBC and other forecasts are so much higher than local sources. I imagine the BBC gets its weather data from a third party, so I don’t suspect the BBC of distorting the figures or anything. But it’s worth noting that the BBC weather data, which I assume is also used for BBC weather news, appears to be much higher than the local weather data. So don’t cancel your holiday to a place like the Costa Brava because you see that the BBC is predicting temperatures close to 40ºC for most of the week. Actually, it’s much cooler than that.
