The weather situation, as it stands

A running page is not an article that happens to be recent. It is a page with no final version: entries are added while a situation develops, the newest sits at the top, and the thing a reader wants first is not the beginning but the last thing that changed. That is why the timestamp leads each entry and the headline does not carry a time at all.

Every timestamp above belongs to the source, not to this page. When a temperature reading is marked at a particular minute, that is the minute the station network recorded it, and it can be twenty minutes behind the moment you opened the page. A forecast issue carries the time it was published and a validity window it stops being true after. Those are different kinds of time and conflating them is the most common error in weather reporting: an outlook issued at midday and still on screen at six is not a current statement about six o'clock.

The entries are also not the same kind of claim. A reading is a measurement that has already happened and cannot change. A forecast is a statement about what has not happened, and it can be superseded by the next issue without anything having been wrong. Where the two disagree — a clear outlook while a station is recording rain — the reading is the one to trust, because the shower is smaller than the forecast area.

Nothing on the page is cached between visits. If a source does not answer, its entry is absent and the count above says so, rather than a stale figure being shown with a fresh-looking time against it. That is the trade this page makes: it can be empty, and it cannot be wrong about when it last heard something.

Geography matters more than the numbers suggest, and the forecast is finer than the measurement. The outlook is issued for 47 named areas across an island roughly 50 km wide; the observation feeds return whichever stations reported, and that is often a handful rather than dozens — the count is printed beside each reading above for exactly that reason. So an islandwide average can be true and useless at once: a shower over one town and clear sky over another average out to an unremarkable afternoon nobody had. Where an entry names an area or a station, that is the unit the source used, and it has not been generalised into a statement about the whole island.

The headline follows the outlook. On a day with thundery showers over part of the island it says so and names the areas; on a clear day it reports that the situation is clear. A running page that always sounds urgent teaches its readers to stop reading it.