The Météo France bulletins are experiencing a huge upheaval at the end of the year. Forecasters worry about the reliability of some forecasts.
It’s the crisis at Météo France. In recent weeks, a project to automate weather forecasts has radically changed the way the weather is announced in the country, including fully automated bulletins which worry specialists. Météo France forecasters have decided to strike until January 7 to warn of this upheaval in the sector and the lack of people to control the conclusions of the algorithms.
The current strike, launched by three main Météo France unions, aims firstly to raise awareness about the climate within the company and to contest the reduction in workforce at a time when Météo France has already lost a third of its employees. in 15 years, as well as a majority of its territorial locations. And the notice could already disrupt the weather forecasts for Christmas, a key period for many French people! But the bulletins produced by Météo France already pose a problem according to them, with aberrations which risk multiplying in the months to come, within a service which is nevertheless essential for many users.
The internal reorganization, called “3P” (program, forecast, production) and favoring automation, indeed raises questions about the reliability of current tools to establish relevant conclusions. Clément Testa, CGT secretary in Toulouse, denounces in particular a “hasty, unsupervised” reorganization, causing “inconsistent” forecasts. Not to mention the lack of agents trained to correct these errors, which is also felt according to him: 7 agents were employed to correct the bulletins generated by computer until now, indicates Libération. Today, only one person must manage this work.
Opponents of the project have already given examples of aberrant weather reports and major errors caused by automation. Among concrete cases, automatic forecasts would have notably announced up to 11 meters of snow in the Vosges in the month of November, despite the mild autumn weather. Snow was also forecast at 10°C in Savoie. More recently, a bulletin predicted a temperature of 28°C in Strasbourg, in the middle of December.
Météo-France has acknowledged some dysfunctions, but maintains that its forecast automation project will allow forecasters to have more time to devote themselves to other, more complex tasks. The public establishment also ensures that the errors observed do not concern the weather alert and vigilance system, a prevention system essential to populations in the event of dangerous phenomena, such as violent winds, rain-floods, storms, snow-ice. , avalanches, heatwaves…