Paphos Life

The other morning as usual I dutifully brought my better half her morning cuppa in bed so she was then in one of her better moods.She immediately asked me what the weather was going to be as it was one of her washing days.I then checked the weather on three sites who all claimed it was going to be a fine day.She hung out the washing about ten oclock and off we went shopping.So far so good.Whilst we where out (you,ve guessed it) the heavens opened.As far as she was concerned her washing day had been ruined and it was yours truly,s fault for telling her it was going to be a fine day. As much as I tried to explain that it was what I had read and not to shoot the messenger it fell on deaf ear,s.
This is not the first time the weather forecasting on the island had been way out so how on earth can you find a correct weather forecast ( and save me from the same fate again)

I share your pain!
Almost impossible I reckon! There are so many variables in terrrain, altitude, land usage etc that can influence the weather, I’ve lost count of the times we’ve been getting a drenching and someone less than a KM away thinks I’m mad talking about the rain - or the other way around. For what it’s worth, the best ones Apps I’ve come across for showing rainfall predictions are Windy and Storm Radar.

I try to be a serious forecaster ( https://weather.bnellis.eu/forecast/ ) but variable weather is just that, variable. My set-up consists of three independent weather stations and loads of software from New Zealand and the USA, on 2 performing PCs. In addition, our forecasts take into account most of the world's meteorological reports and, because I don't have a supercomputer, we cull off data more than about 2000 km away from Cyprus, taking into account the movements of data in the direction of the prevailing weather. The data is on a 27 km grid over 64 levels of altitude, up to the troposphere. We can calculate the mass of water vapour in the different levels of the atmosphere and translate it into rainfall. What no one can do in typical Cypriot weather is to predict the trigger that will translate the clouds into rain showers; we can predict the mass of the rainfall over an area of, say, 250 km², but we cannot predict that you will have 0.5 cm of rain in one village, none in the next and 3¾ cm in a village 5 km away.

That is why we may forecast, e.g.,

A slight chance of rain in the morning, then a chance of rain in the afternoon. ... Chance of precipitation 40 percent. Precipitation mostly between 2 and 5 mm.

This may be loosely translated into 'you may well have a shower, seriously enough to wet you, if you go out in the afternoon, but it may be dry in the next village!'

I have published a Weather Note 'Interpreting weather forecasts' at https://weather.bnellis.eu/notes/foreca ... ation.html