What are the Met Office playing at?

OK, it's just after 1330 on Monday 8th February. I've just gone and picked up my lunch. To my surprise it was snowing pretty damn heavily.

I decided to swing by the BBC weather feed (direct from the Met Office) to see what they had to say. Surprisingly they'd decided that it wasn't actually snowing outside (See the image below).


This being somewhat contrary to my actual observations, I looked at another weather site (Accuweather, which is based in the US). For whatever reason, they were actually predicting snow today:
Who cares? I mean it's only weather forecasting, it's not actually a serious matter surely? Well, as I noted a few weeks ago the Met Office don't seem to actually be doing a very good job of Long Term forecasting and I suggested that their computer models (biased towards warming, as even the BBC picked up) were affecting their forecasts.

Well, it's been a pretty cold winter so far. Sure we've had a week or so of slightly warmer weather, but the Arctic Oscillation is heading negative again. It wouldn't take a Rocket Surgeon to assume some colder weather is en-route and perhaps the odd warning of snow would be useful.

The belief currently is that the Met Office has only screwed up their long-term forecasts with their increasing reliance on models. As today's results show, it looks like they may be getting the day by day forecasts wrong as well. If an American company based in Pennsylvania can predict our day-to-day weather better then surely the Met Office are doing something wrong.

Incidentally: this is that company's prediction for this January. This was made in November. Looks like the Met Office is pretty much the only people who thought it would be mild