I keep a notebook where I note down the things I've learned after, pretty much, every flight. One of the early notes says:
Never, ever cancel a flight on the basis of a forecast until you are at the airfield.
From
Above the Law:
Everybody in aviation, at some point or another, if not quite continuously, moans about the ‘met man’ – the meteorological officer who reports on and forecasts the weather. The ‘met man’, who is quite often a met woman, works for the Met Office, which makes sense, I suppose.
The Met Office, which is based in Exeter in the south-west of England, has a super-computer which cost £97 million and is capable of doing 14,000 trillion calculations a second, which sounds like the kind of number I’d make up, just to try to be funny, but it isn’t. This computer is eighty per cent accurate, which sounds pretty good until you realise that the weather patterns in the UK tend to go in four-day runs, sometimes more.
For instance, as I write this we are in a weather pattern in the east of England which means that the weather we had yesterday – dull with the odd shower – is not only the weather we’ve got today but is the weather we’re likely to have for the next week. The temperature at midday is not likely to vary by more than a couple of degrees all week and even the wind speed and direction isn’t supposed to be very different tomorrow to what it was yesterday. That means that if you say ‘much the same as today’ you will be accurate in your forecast for the next seven days – that’s eighty-six per cent accurate and you’ll have saved £97 million. And, when I say ‘you’ll’, I do mean you, because that was your tax money.
That’s not to say that the Met Office has wasted money on its computer – oh no. Their massive computer can give them all sorts of interesting statistics – like the fact that the warmest place in the UK is the Scilly Isles and the sunniest is Bognor Regis. Interestingly enough, equidistant between these two is a city called Exeter. Coincidence?
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Above-Law-Adventures-police-helicopter/dp/1785632620/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1627208539&sr=8-2