The weather plays a huge part in our lives, as it influences what we have to wear, what we carry with us and, for many, also their mood.

So getting precise information on what one is to expect is vital, especially for people who like to plan.

The Met Office at Luqa has been providing this information for the last 100 years. On this occasion, The Malta Independent on Sunday sat down with Martine Gatt, a forecaster, to find out more.

Asked how information on the weather changed over the years, she explained how when the weather started to be documented in Malta, the weather forecast was limited to just one day. With newer equipment it was then possible to extend the forecast to three days, then to five, and nowadays to seven, thanks to improvements in technology.

“In the beginning it was even difficult to forecast a few hours, nowadays with the advance in technology we have managed to gain the seven-day forecast,” she said.

Gatt said that 100 years ago the equipment used to forecast the weather was certainly not as advanced as it is today.

As an example, she said that when a pilot needed weather information for a smooth flight, he would have to physically go to the MET offices to be handed his weather information that covered the route “in pieces”.

In 1955 the office started to use what they refer to as numerical weather products, which are models that give out weather forecasts. Nowadays this is done in a modernised way via computers, where apart from giving a forecast for consecutive days, the weather can be predicted with more accuracy.

Gatt said that although technologies have allowed for more days to be forecast beforehand, the further the prediction goes the less accurate it gets. She said that the further away one goes, the greater the chance that the prediction could be inaccurate. It is much easier to forecast what will happen today and over the next week, but further than that the chances of mistakes increase. It is therefore not unusual that, say, bad weather is predicted in 10 days’ time but then, when closer to the day, the forecast changes.

In 1977, the satellite images used for weather forecast were increased from two per hour to four per hour. As time went by so did the quality of the forecast, with Gatt saying that the pictures are so clear nowadays you can see formed types of clouds as if they were taken with a camera.

“The better the resolution, the more accurate the weather predictions,” she said.

Generally, it can be said that weather predictions have become more accurate, “and it will become more so when better equipment and products become available”.

In the last 100 years since the MET office has taken care of weather predictions, temperature documentations have shown that the average temperature in Malta has increased by 1.1 degrees.

“At this point this average is not bad but we have to take into consideration that during these 100 years there was more room for inaccuracy and human error, as they used to read temperatures manually; while nowadays everything is digitalised,” she said.

Gatt added that in her educated opinion although there might be a slight discrepancy in this 1.1 degrees average, the temperature is increasing and “if the temperature continues to rise at this rate I believe that the consequences could be very unpleasant”.

She said that the MET office has registered longer heat waves than it did in the past. What was once a four-to-five-day norm for a heatwave, a new 12-day record was recorded last year.

“Last year we had one which lasted 12 whole days, followed by another one just after it,” she said.

Heatwaves are calculated by comparing the temperature to the average of the same period of time. If the average temperature is 30 degrees, then a heatwave is present when the temperature reaches 35 degrees and remains so for three consecutive days, Gatt said.

Referring to winters, Gatt said that the coldest temperature she remembers in Malta was on New Year’s Eve in 2014, when 2.1 degrees were registered. The coldest ever was even lower, at 1.4 degrees in January 1981.

Although no new extreme cold temperatures have been recorded, the first four months of 2022 were all cooler than their respective norms.

Asked whether she thinks this will happen again she said that the future cannot be predicted as even for that particular day it was unexpected.

Gatt explained that during that particular night in 2014 a mass of cold air came from Northern Europe and proceeded to cover the centre of the Mediterranean, decreasing the temperature to “levels we have never witnessed”.

Asked how forecasters are able to predict weather conditions for seven days consecutively, she explained that computer models are used to enable them to come up with the forecast.

Gatt said that like in every country that has its own MET office, Malta’s is sectioned into two categories. On one side you have forecasters and on the other side there are observers.

Observers work out the actual weather at the current time, after which all this information is gathered into these numerical weather products. Lastly these are presented in an easier way to read so that the forecast can be drawn up.

Gatt said that despite the advanced technologies, the size of Malta together with its location does cause a bit of difficulty when it comes to weather forecast accuracy.

“For example, if we (the MET office) forecast a rainy day and it doesn’t rain all over Malta, people start to doubt us, when in reality it would have rained, but it wouldn’t have affected all of the island,” she said.

She added that the numerical models used are updated every six hours, which means that the forecast for the day can change four times in a given day.

Apart from that the MET office updates its official website up to four times a day so that people have access to the latest and most accurate weather conditions.

Apart from catering for the general public with their weather forecasts, the MET office is also responsible for creating a separate forecast for mariners, since they need weather coverage for a larger area. Apart from mariners, similar data is also used by the civil protection in their rescue searches as “they would need certain information covering a wider area, which extends further than Malta”.

The area covered by the MET office for search and rescues extends up to 40,352 km2, while the flight information region covered reaches 213,342 km2.

Asked how other weather sites, particularly those that use social media, affect the weather forecast, Gatt said that the Met Office’s forecast remains the only official source.

Although the Met Office is more than willing to help anyone needing information, it has to deal with multiple calls on a weekly basis from people who ask to clear weather concerns spread by other sources.