The Weather Forecast Thread

Indeed, I had the same thought that some people may confuse the cloud cover with landmass texturing, which is I think what probably nailed the coffin shut on using green for the land. Looking at the mock-ups with green land, the confusion is that much greater, especially given that the last-generation maps were textured as well.

I agree too that the time/day graphic is poor; I don't see any reason why they couldn't have had a full-width bar at the bottom as with the last graphics set. And you're quite right that it would be good to have a final summary screen with the symbols; it would certainly be more welcome than the "endcap" they seem to have introduced with the big round blob and BBC Weather and bbc.co.uk/weather captions.

This rain pattern is no less precise than the last one, they used extrapolated radar data before the relaunch to show rain. This is the same, just smoother.

Well I quite like it, I was never a fan of the previous version. I still prefer Yorkshire Weather though, I can find out all I need to know from that and their presentation is bob-on.

An excellent point, well made!

I hate the new graphics. They are in no way an advancement at all. I had always admired the BBC for resisting the temptation to move towards blue and brown animated graphics, which is what ITV introduced in 1989.

In fact, that's what the BBC's new system looks like - like an experimental version of ITV's 1989 graphics, before they'd been fine tuned. Even in 1989, ITV had a mixture of animated symbols and shading over the land mass, but most importantly - showed ALL of the map ALL of the time!

As for those who want to see exactly where the boundaries are - why?! All that rain and cloud moves over time! What the charts are supposed to show is the rough pattern of movement - add to that the always-present room for error and you can at least use that to work out, in addition to the weather you experience when you leave your house of a morning, whether you're likely to be on the fringe of that band of rain, right beneath it or nowhere near. With the new system you have to have eyes like a hawk and a road atlas to understand it.

The fans of the new system seem to think weather forecasts should be measurable to each and every northing and easting of the Ordnance Survey grid.

If they were green and showed the whole of the UK, then it would be better. As the last poster says, it looks like something from 1989! I'll probably get used to it like I normally do with bad presentation though.

http://www.jamesison.co.uk/misc/bbcweather1.jpg

VERSUS

http://www.rp-networkservices.com/tvforum/uploads/cloud.jpg

Am I the only one thinking the old cloud representation was far more stylish, easier to understand and could have been developed in-house to do what the new graphics are trying to achieve?

That's the close-up cloud though. They do have a white/grey cloud cover on the new one - they should use it more though I feel.

The new graphics just don't work well on BBC World. With the old graphics, they could cover the entire world's weather in one form or another in 2 minutes, but now it seems that they only talk about the weather for 1/2 the world. A step backwards in my opinion.

No you're not the only one, the old system had more information presented in a much clearer, easy to understand and straightforward way. I agree with those people saying that removing the symbols is like doing away with the Tube map - if it ain't broke...

With typical London Bias they've missed out Birmingham on the maps so far.

I also found the weather presenter on Breakfast using the excuse that she wanted to keep things simple on the first day totally unacceptable - why should viewers have to put up with it if they're not ready? A very lame reason.

I think she was trying to make things easy for the viewer, not the presenter - breaking us in gently, if you will..

Since when has Maidstone been part of the BBC London region? When I was there, it was BBC South East terrestrially.

I don't wish to go too off topic here, but I happened to flick past London News this morning on News 24 and noticed in the travel bit they mentioned delays to the Bedford to Bletchy trainline, in an area served by Look East, a considerable distance out of the London area.