£27m weather computer's gaffe

It was supposed to revolutionise British weather forecasts.

There would be no more gaffes or missed thunderstorms, the Met Office told us. A new £27.5 million computer, switched on just two weeks ago, was to give the country its most accurate forecasts yet.

However, at the weekend it all went wrong. Londoners woke on Sunday expecting torrential rain, thunder and lighting. Instead they got clear skies and warm temperatures.

"We have to hold our hands up and say that for 10 million Londoners, we got it wrong," said a Met Office spokesman. "The wind effectively held the storms around Gatwick, so that while for much of the South-East we were right, for London we were not.

"It just goes to show that weather is very fickle."

The supercomputer is one of the world's most powerful - equivalent to 8,000 home computers and containing 128 separate processors. It produces five-day forecasts and, according to the Met Office, it should have improved the accuracy of forecasts by 11 per cent. "It's really a massive improvement in terms of what we can see - it just so happened that in this case we were 20 miles out," said the spokesman.