On Sat, 15 Nov 2003 15:44:42 -0000, "Jim Webster"
wrote:

"John Hall" wrote in message

I don't think that it has happened _yet_, but that does not mean that
forecasters may not be genuinely worried about the possibility of it
happening in future. (Sorry about the double negative in that sentence,
but hopefully you get the drift.)

but surely you would be more open to litigation if you knowingly overstated
a weather event as you would be if you just got the forecast wrong.

After all, if it was an genuine mistake then the court might well decide
that you did your best under the circumstances. But if someone cancels a
function because the forecast was so dreadful, and it comes out that the
forecast was overstated as part of a stratagy to cover the forecasters back,
then I would have thought the court would take a pretty dim view of it.

Quite. A good defence against an action for negligence is to show that
you did your best i.e. in this case, issued the forecast it was
thought most likely to occur (or a range of possibilities with
probabilities). Anything other than that is potentially negligent.

My main point though is that *if* policy is to "play safe" by
overstating things for fear of litigation, you are doing the public
and industry a disservice to protect against a court case that may not
occur for another 10 or 20 years. Compared to the total budget of the
Met Office over that period, whatever damages are paid will be tiny.
Anyway, that's the job of Insurance or, in the case of Government
agencies, "self-insurance" (Government contingency funds).

The Met Office should simply get on with issuing the best forecasts
they can and if they need to cover themselves, do it with
probabilities - the real probabilities! I really do think that the
litigation/overegging forecasts argument simply doesn't hold water.

But maybe that's what they do anyway....

--
Dave