Someone may be paid to look out of the window

A regional meteorological service would suspend its forecast for a four-hour maintenance window every Tuesday, during which the public would be directed to a person standing at a window. The post would be advertised. It would pay by the hour and does not require an umbrella.

Weather forecasting is increasingly produced by machine-learning models trained on decades of historical data, and in many published tests these systems now match or beat traditional physics-based forecasts while using far less computing power. National weather services are moving forecast production and distribution onto cloud infrastructure and consumer apps, which means the forecast most people see is a software product with releases, outages and maintenance schedules. Several public weather agencies face budget pressure and rely on a shrinking number of staffed observation stations. Popular weather apps have already gone down for hours, leaving users with stale or missing forecasts.

WANTED. Window Observer (casual, Tuesdays). A regional meteorological service seeks a reliable adult to look out of a north-facing window between 02:00 and 06:00 during scheduled forecast maintenance. Duties: noting whether it is raining, and roughly how much. Describing the sky in plain words when asked by members of the public. No forecasting experience required and none will be accepted. Must supply own window. Chair provided. Hourly rate plus an allowance for wind. Applicants who own a coat with a hood will be prioritised. No agencies.

Under the scheme, the service's forecast model — the one that now writes most of the weather that appears on phones — would be taken offline for four hours every Tuesday for patching, retraining and what the tender documents call “planned unavailability of the atmosphere”. During the window, the app would show the last known forecast, marked with a small grey clock. Anyone asking what the weather was doing would be redirected to the observer, who would be doing it the old way. The service describes this as continuity of service. The observer describes it as looking outside.

The slot was chosen because usage data suggested fewer people check the forecast between two and six on a Tuesday morning than at any other time, and the ones who do are mostly bakers, night nurses and people who have woken up with a feeling. These groups would be notified in advance. A pilot in one county would reportedly have gone smoothly, apart from an hour in which it rained heavily and the observer, Dorottya Halmi, 58, was asked by eleven separate callers whether she was sure.

The cultural effects would be felt first in conversation. Bus queues, which in this country run largely on remarks about the sky, would fall quiet during the window, since nobody could say with authority what the sky was going to do, only what it was doing now, which was visible. A café owner in the pilot county said her regulars had taken to opening with “well, it's maintenance again”, and then standing there. Others would revert to reading the clouds, an activity most had not attempted since school and few had been good at then.

The frozen forecast would produce its own weather. A last-known reading of “light showers, clearing” would stay on screens for four hours regardless of what fell, and a farmer, Bence Sallai, 44, said he had cut a field on the strength of a forecast that was, strictly, a screenshot. Complaints would be handled by the observer, who has no authority to change the weather and has said so. Anything that happened during the window would be logged afterwards as “weather occurring during maintenance” and excluded from the annual figures, which would make Tuesday, on paper, the driest day of the week.

A spokesperson for the service said the model's accuracy had improved to the point where it could no longer safely be left running unattended, and that the human observer was a temporary measure until the model could be trusted to look out of the window itself. The advertisement would draw a large number of applicants, among them several retired forecasters, one of whom described the hours as familiar, and a man who wrote that he had been doing this for free from a bench for thirty years and would like to know why it had taken so long.

Other services would be watching. The tide tables, which are now also generated rather than calculated, would be considering a window of their own, and the office responsible for sunrise times has said it sees no reason it should be the only one expected to run continuously. Ms Halmi would agree to a second season. She would say the work was not hard, that the sky was where it had always been, and that the only real difficulty was people ringing at half past four to ask whether the rain she was describing was the forecast one or a new one.