The UK faces worst snowfall in a million years. Or does it?

When it comes to online nonsense, it doesn’t come much ludicrous than the tabloid “weather report”.

Our regular readers will be more accustomed to us talking about social media rumours, chain email, malware or identity theft, as opposed to discussing the weather. But as the northern hemisphere sees winter looming, we take a look into the sensationalist weather reports you see every year touting the ostensible extreme weather threatening the months ahead.

Extreme snowfall to blanket the country * Worst blizzards in several decades * Unprecedented wind to bring everything to a standstill… or in April/May time we see Hottest Summer Since Record Began * Blistering Heat to Cover UK For Next 3 months”…

It’s like we hear the same regurgitated headlines every single year.

Well, as it turns out, we actually do hear the same headlines every year.

And yet every year it hardly ever seems to materialise into anything significant. The headlines are either exaggerated or flat out wrong. But why?

As with much sensationalist chitchat you see over the Internet, the source ultimately lies at the doorstep of tabloid “journalism”.

As some of our readers may have originally suspected, extreme weather headlines sell papers and increase online traffic, and the sad fact is that whilst extreme weather may not be on the cards, it isn’t going to prevent tabloid journalists from telling you otherwise.

Perhaps one of the worst offenders for touting extreme weather is the UKs The Daily Express which at this time of year will print dozens of headlines, from “record breaking snowfall” to “the coldest winter in decades”. These notoriously exaggerated and inaccurate reports are written by Nathan Rao.

But where do they get their information from? Well in the case of The Daily Express the answer is via little known weather companies, such as “Exacta Weather” or “Vantage Weather Services”, companies with a less-than-stellar reputation for long range forecasting, who use, amongst other things, “variations in solar output” to determine their findings. Such findings that curiously consistently predict extreme or record breaking weather patterns for tabloid newspapers to report.

In fact these companies are barely companies at all, in some cases merely individuals who claim to set up weather predicting companies, like in the case of Jonathan Powell, who has sprung up as a forecaster for more than one weather service in the past.

The Express has actually quoted little-known weather “companies” as opposed to other larger, more reputable weather stations, in almost all of their recent stories regarding the weather. Stories, that predictably have all turned out to be exaggerated or just wrong. See the images below, all from The Express, and printed within days or weeks of each other between October and November 2013.

This is a paradigm that we often find too regularly in tabloid weather reporting, as well as other areas of tabloid journalism too. Whether the weather turns out to be right or wrong does not seem to matter. After all, the paper was only quoting a source and reporting the “news”. The only problem is that The Express purposely chose the source that would provide the better headline.

Ultimately getting your weather from these weather companies via tabloid reporting is akin to seeking medical advice from your tea leaves – i.e. you’re better off going to the real thing.

State funded entities like the UK’s Met Office are generally the best place to visit. They may not always get it right, but if you get your weather forecast from papers like The Daily Express then you’re better off climbing a big hill with a pair of binoculars for a more accurate reading.

Do you have a favourite place to get your weather reports from? Have you been fooled by tabloid weather reports in the past? Let us know below.