A few days ago, weather forecasters were warning the public about a period of freezing weather and snow. Major British commercial broadcasters’ websites have expressed the levels of snowfall exclusively in centimetres. There has been no use of inches for snowfall in their online weather reports.
On the ITV News website, under the heading “Amber warning for heavy snow and ‘blizzard conditions'” 1, the sections on snow say:
- The Met Office said “strong winds bringing blizzard conditions” are on the way for the region from 3pm on Thursday until noon on Friday, with 30-40 cm of snow.
- Residual impacts from snowfall are expected to continue throughout Friday morning, with 10-20 cm of snow predicted to fall quite widely. Some places could see as much as 30-40 cm.
- Met Office spokesperson Nicola Maxey said average snow levels of 2-5 cm are expected across much of the UK tomorrow, including in major northern cities like Manchester, Liverpool and Newcastle.
Sky News reports 2 that “Latest weather updates as alerts are issued by the Met Office, health authorities and the National Highways Agency as up to 40 cm of snow is forecast for some areas.”. A similar Sky News report 3 also uses centimetres exclusively.
Channel 4 News says that “Extreme weather warnings have been issued for large parts of the UK – with blizzards, high winds and up to 40 cm of snow expected in the worst hit places.”. 4
GB News website’s Weather section tells us the following about the level of snow in its report 5:
- Areas in the South West and South East will see the most significant snowfall with 1-2 cm for many and up to 5 cm on higher ground.
- In the South West, 2-5 cm of snow could land with the chance of 8-10 cm on modest hills, including North Wessex Downs, Surrey Hills and North Downs.
- A National Highways spokesperson said: “Overall 2-5 cm is expected to accumulate quite widely with isolated spots on the highest routes seeing 5-10 cm, for instance on the M5 J1-J3, M1 J6a and M40 High Wycombe.”
Commercial broadcasters have not considered it necessary to provide imperial conversions for centimetres. Unlike commercial broadcasters, the BBC has felt it needed to provide imperial conversions for centimetres. 6 7 Why has the BBC felt it needed to convert centimetres to inches in its weather reports? Why has the BBC not followed commercial broadcasters in using centimetres only?
Sources:
- https://www.itv.com/news/2023-03-08/more-snow-expected-as-arctic-cold-snap-intensifies (ITV News, “Amber warning for heavy snow and ‘blizzard conditions’”, Thursday 9 March 2023)
- https://news.sky.com/video/uk-weather-blizzards-60mph-winds-to-bring-treacherous-conditions-12829834# (Sky News, “UK weather: Blizzards & 60mph winds to bring ‘treacherous conditions'”, Thursday 9 March 2023)
- https://news.sky.com/story/uk-weather-latest-blizzards-and-60mph-winds-to-bring-treacherous-conditions-with-almost-all-of-uk-to-be-hit-by-snow-or-rain-12827754 (Sky News, “UK weather – latest: Blizzards and 60mph winds to bring ‘treacherous conditions’ – with almost all of UK to be hit by snow or rain”)
- https://www.channel4.com/news/extreme-weather-warnings-issued-across-uk-with-blizzards-and-high-winds-expected (Channel 4 News, “Extreme weather warnings issued across UK with blizzards and high winds expected”, Thursday 9 March 2023)
- https://www.gbnews.com/weather/uk-snow-alert-motorway-warning-severe-weather-alert-issued (GB News, “UK snow alert: Motorway warning as ‘severe weather alert’ issued for ‘prolonged and heavy’ downpour”, Wednesday 8 March 2023)
- https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/uk-64883505?pinned_post_locator=urn:asset:490e66a3-1f57-4eea-8c0e-9b973204b941&pinned_post_asset_id=640a23d4f7ce9556ed073fd4&pinned_post_type=share (BBC News, “Only drive if necessary, motorists told as heavy snow falls”, Thursday 9 March 2023)
- https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-64875441 (BBC News, “Snow and travel delays expected as Arctic blast hits UK”, Thursday 9 March 2023)
Metric Views 
Sadly, the recent events at the BBC have demonstrated that they must be in the pocket of the current Conservative government, which seems obsessed with flag waving and a pointless hearkening back to the old empire.
Let’s hope folks realize this is a long con on their part and bring in a new set of players to run the government. That team might realize harmonizing with big trading partners is the sensible route to go on may different levels, including fully adopting the global standard system of measurement.
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Oh, and it gets worse at the BBC. The link provided in the post above has a summary sidebar on the left that actually includes a conversion from Celsius to Fahrenheit for the temperature lows in Scotland. Really??? Since when has the BBC done this even for cold temperatures?
Referenced link:
https://www.bbc.com/news/live/uk-64883505?pinned_post_locator=urn:asset:490e66a3-1f57-4eea-8c0e-9b973204b941&pinned_post_asset_id=640a23d4f7ce9556ed073fd4&pinned_post_type=share
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By the looks of things, the BBC’s general position seems to be generally include both but the order depends on the situation in question. With USA stories being given predominately in antiquated units followed by metric e.g. 10 ft (3m), while stories in most of the world are predominately metric e.g 250 km (156 miles), while the UK being a mess means that it is up to them to determine the context to which is deem to be the more familiar first. As temperature is almost universally given in Celsius means that Celsius is given precedent while the consequence of the road signs still being in miles means that miles is given precedent over km.
Of course the problem with doing that it creates confusing inconsistency where people where people ultimately unable to get use to using modern units if things are referenced to them in regards to antiquated units. Other countries broadcasters realised this so decided to switch over to fully metric when it became the official system of measurement. Rather than trying to appease everyone and perpetrating it through whatever is the deemed ‘common usage’ at the time.
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I was disappointed to hear David Attenborough say Centigrade in the first episode of his new ‘flagship’ series, Wild Isles on BBC 1.
I don’t blame him as it is an easy error to make having to switch from Fahrenheit to Centigrade to Celsius in the second half of his life. However, with their vast budgets, I do blame the editors and directors as they should know better and check the BBC Style Guide if they are unsure.
Which brings me on to Countryfile………..Have you noticed that some presenters use hectares and some use acres. There’s no consistency and clearly, again, the editors are not doing their jobs.
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Although the BBC does go overboard in including Imperial units in their articles alongside metric, I notice in the article below a complete hodge-podge of both metric and Imperial that might just set a new record for insanity:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-65726193
The most confusing part of the article is that an India official is quoted as saying:
“The officer has drained 41 lakh litres, which could have been used for irrigation purpose for 1,500 acres of land.”
Why “acres” from an Indian official? Isn’t India 100% metric?
And this comes on top of an earlier part of the article that refers to the amount of water the official being investigated has drained from a reservoir in both “square kilometres” and “hectares” (i..e. the area of land that the water could have irrigated) but also mentioned the number of litres of water (volume) that was wasted and then added the equivalent in gallons in parentheses for good measure.
My head is just spinning! How could the BBC allow such a monstrous messy mish-mash of units in that one article? Straight up metric only would definitely have been the way to go!
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Ezra said:
“My head is just spinning! How could the BBC allow such a monstrous messy mish-mash of units in that one article? Straight up metric only would definitely have been the way to go!”
I would be completely surprised if the BBC itself has the power to allow or disallow anything. It isn’t a sentient being capable of any thoughts and/or actions. There has to be a person or a number of persons who are making these decisions. Possibly using their own personal feelings in their choice instead of what is best for the common good.
Maybe it isn’t the author of any article making a personal choice as to what units appear but the author’s boss forcing personal unit choices on all under his or her control. But in many cases today, a computer programmed to spot units can be used to make changes to an author’s personal choice, such as adding conversions.
Real people and not non-sentient institutions are responsible for these actions and real people have names and their names should be spoken (or written) so we all know who they are. Maybe so we can all write to them expressing our views as paying customers as to what units we want.
The author of this particular article is Mattea Bubalo, most likely a person of Indian origin and thus hopefully has no desire to support anti-metrication in England. I think he did a great job in presenting metric first and as primary and I think a computer did the conversions in parentheses. As for the quote, that was the preference of the Indian government official. Why he chose to use acres instead of hectares is anyone’s guess. So you may need to contact him and ask him why and then let the rest of us know.
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The BBC did once have a policy of sorts on temperature. Sometime in the 1980s, I think, in response to a query on one of the programmes that responded to viewers and listeners’ letters. It went something like this.
“The Met Office would prefer us to drop giving temperatures in Fahrenheit. However we like to give Fahrenheit as well as Celsius, because some of our listeners, especially the older ones, are not yet used to Celsius and we want to give them time to make the change.”
Well it was a policy of sorts, even though one we might not agree with. Nowadays the BBC does not seem to have any policy – it’s just “Anything goes” – whatever report comes in is just passed on unmodified.
As for “older listeners” (bless their hearts!) the BBC has only itself to blame for preserving the “Auntie” image.
Reith must be rolling in his grave.
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@Metricmac: The appropriate way to have handled this situation on television would have been to have a dual unit thermometer alongside the presenter and the presenter would have used Celsius -only. Those who needed a Fahrenheit value could then have consulted the dual -unit thermometer. They would quickly have learnt the relationship between Celsius and Farhenheit and after a few months the thermometer could have been dropped.
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Once again the BBC editors and reporters (actual people, mind you) have blown it in their short video on the heat index to indicate the heat stress on the human body:
https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-us-canada-66071216
Why show a thermometer graphic just in Fahrenheit in the video? And why refer to Fahrenheit temperatures in the narration followed by an almost throw-away quickie mention of Celsius?
Then I realized the video was in the news section labeled “US and Canada”. But it seems like the editors and presenters forgot that Canada uses only Celsius and have done so since the 1970’s. I guess the USA is the 350 kg gorilla in the room and poor Canada is lucky to get any consideration at all.
Except that readers of the story in the rest of the world who might be interested in the heat index topic (which applies to all humans, not just Americans) will be confounded by the almost complete absence of temperature expressed in Celsius. Just plain weird and sad, unfortunately. 😦
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Ezra,
Heat index, like its winter counterpart wind chill is primarily an American invention “designed” around rounded fahrenheit temperatures. If you go to Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_index
You can scroll down to the chart and see that the temperatures are based on every two fahrenheits. The degrees Celsius appear to be for every degree, but 35 °C is missing which results from conversion rounding errors causing 35 to be skipped.
I guess one could go to the Spanish (or any language of your choosing) page for Temperatura de bochorno and get an extensive true Celsius only chart where 35 °C is not missing, but most English speakers won’t bother to look at anything that might force them to think.
https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperatura_de_bochorno
Now, compare the Spanish chart with the American chart and notice the temperatures in celsius don’t match at every point.
Heat index like Wind Chill can often be confused with real temperatures and as far as I know, outside the US they are not used by the majority of weather services outside the US thus there is no interest to make them more celsius friendly. The only sources for information thus come from the US and converting them to a Celsius only base isn’t considered worth the time or effort.
Best to stick with real temperatures in degrees Celsius and ignore the dual fallacies of wind chill and heat index.
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@Daniel – You cannot serve two masters ….. In this case, it appears that Fahrneheit is the master and that the Celsius temperatures are approximations (a 2 °F change is actually equal to a 1.11 °C) change. The reason that the 35 °C reading was left out is because enough 0.11 °C “overflows” had accumulated to result in one value being skipped.
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@Daniel – The WIkipedia article on wind chill gives formulae in both customary and metric units. A few years ago, I set up an EXCEL spreadsheet adn convinced myself that teh two were equivalent.
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Martin,
The Spanish Language chart appears to have created its heat index values from the algorithms that are not true formulas but approximate a desired result. With this in mind, the English chart should be the same as the Spanish chart and not produce celsius results by conversion from foreignheat units. If that can only be done by having two separate charts, than that is what needs to be done.
I think it would improve the heat index article if celsius and foreignheat units were separate.
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Just saw an RTE news report on farmers being encouraged to go back to traditional farming techniques to improve biodiversity and preserve endangered species (such as certain birds).
The report was quite well done and most encouraging. The one fly in the ointment was the farmer who was interviewed on his adopting those traditional practices when he used “acres” to describe the size of his farm instead of “hectares”. Even though he was clearly an older gentleman I was surprised that some folks in Ireland are still using Imperial units like “acres”.
Does anyone have any insight if this is just one person’s holdover just because they grew up knowing the size of their farm in acres? Has “hectares” pretty much displaced “acres” in Ireland?
I ask because it seems pretty clear that “kilometres” have displaced “miles” in Ireland because of the changeover of road signs to metric and the subsequent adoption by the media of “kilometres” instead of “miles” in their reports. Seems like something analogous should have occurred with “hectares” vs “acres”, but I really have no clue. 🙂
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Ezra Steinberg: The farmer may have been a fairly old chap, but his farm was probably surveyed in his great grandfather’s days, hence area given in acres. Land plots do not change size over time, so the old measurement tends to stick. Modern surveys, e.g. for land redevelopments, are conducted in metric so areas are calculated in hectares. I can therefore understand, if not encourage, farmers using acres for land area. There is no excuse for the likes of the BBC using acres for areas of land in Germany, like I recently heard.
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Since Trump has threatened Canada with its incorporation into the USA as the 51st state I have been following news reports from Canada.
One very pleasant experience was watching a private (?) television channel reporting some news item where all of the units used were metric just as one sees regularly on Australian television. They even pronounced KILL-oh-metre correctly. 🙂
One of the silver linings from the thread of American absorption of Canada into the USA is a desire up there to be more Canadian, which I suspect will include a stronger impulse to differentiate themselves in the measurement space with the use of metric rather than “Imperial”. They are also moving towards improved east-west trade across the provinces within Canada and also more trade with the EU and with Asia. This can also boost a deeper rooting of metric use in the Canadian economy.
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As a counterpoint to what I just posted, I saw a new report from the flagship Canadian news channel about how Canadians are avoiding American products in the shops. They showed scenes from a major supermarket in Canada (likely Toronto) where the shot of the signs in the produce department showed the cost of the goods in dollars per pound.
This is disappointing but it shows that Canada still has a ways to go before being even as metric as the UK in the shops while paradoxically being 100% metric on the roads. Their own version of a metric muddle, it seems.
Ezra aka punditgi
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Here is a YouTube video from CBC that concurs with punditgi’s post on Canadian advertising by the pound.
This video shows most prepackaged goods in grams only. Baby Carrots are from the US and is labelled as 340 g /12 oz. Only the meat has a shelf label in pounds only. It’s impossible to read the meat package label to see if it shows grams or pounds:
In this video, a bag of apples at 0:11 is in metric (FFU) but is an odd size of 2.72 kg (6 lb). Bread is labelled as 675 g only. Carrots and other products of the USA are marked the same as the apples. A package of bacon was 500 g only. Cavendish Farms, a Canadian company is in rounded grams only. Ice Cream is metric only.
Too bad CBC has turned off the comments as it would be a nice place to post pro-kilogram comments. It is somewhat understandable that US products are rounded FFU and with strange metric in parentheses, but some of these are packaged in special packages for Canada with a Canadian label. They could easily be packaged in rounded metric sizes. There is no reason Apples can’t be in a 2.5 kg bag. Apples have a mass of 70 to 100 g and the difference of 22 g would not even result in a change of product, just a more rounded number appearing on the label.
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@Daniel Excellent post. Many thanks for the videos and commentary. 🙂
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