What are these charts?

These weather forecast charts are generated by software written and maintained by James McGregor. Chart plotting is powered by Generic Mapping Tools (GMT). The data used is obtained from the United States National Weather Service. These charts are updated approximately every 6 hours and provide forecasts up to 180h ahead of the time they were issued.

It takes six hours to generate all the forecasts and so the issue time should be between 6-12 hours behind the current time. If this is not the case try pressing the 'refresh' button on your browser

Some comments on forecast reliability

We are looking forward to receiving feedback on the usefulness of the longer period forecasts, we aren't sure how good they will be. We suspect that different users, who each have their own particular need for a forecast, will each have a different perception of their usefulness and accuracy.

Clearly reliability will decline with the length of the forecast - experience and time will tell how significant this is. We wouldn't advise anyone to take the seven day forecasts literally but hope that these longer forecasts will provide some useful indication of how things might develop.

If the longer forecasts are of little or no value then we will remove them from the MetVUW site.

Disclaimer

The data on these pages are provided with no guarantees as to their accuracy or timeliness. They are not intended for use in making life or death decisions, or decisions relating to the protection of property.