Weather forecasting at regional and national scales has improved vastly over the past half century with accuracy three or four days ahead now about equal to one day out in the 1960s. This improvement has largely been driven by the phenomenal increase in supercomputing power combined with modelling developments harnessing that, but this has exposed a growing deficit in local ultra-short range weather forecasting. Improvements at that scale, in areas down to just one two square kilometers and timescales of a few hours, have not kept pace largely because the grids used for the models are not small enough and sufficiently reliable data cannot be collected fast enough. There are signs of that changing and mobile communications is playing a…