Puddle thinking

Rain is as much a part of Britain as the royal family. However, it seems the hourly probability of rain in the United Kingdom is actually quite low - about one in 12 in fact. Robert Matthews, a visiting research fellow at Aston University, says once this low "base-rate" of rain is taken into account, the Met Office's 83 per cent accurate forecasts are more than twice as likely to be wrong as right in predicting showers.

According to the professor, the accuracy figures are misleading because they are heavily biased by success in predicting the absence of rain. For a given hour, this is over ten times more likely than rain. Matthews says the best strategy is to simply ignore 24-hour forecasts and not take an umbrella on walks, but we're going to keep ours handy nevertheless.