Nutloose: appalling statistics.
If readers will indulge a slight historical digression?
Met., like aviation, was in its infancy in 1940. Flyers avoided bad weather [very sensibly] when they could, and in-cloud physical research was minimal. Like the RAF, the Met Office had huge wartime expansion and perforce had to recruit many staff without relevant experience: geographers, physicists, schoolies etc.
Ernest Gann's Fate is the Hunter gives a flavour of wartime flying and poor or non-existent forecasting.
When I joined in 1955 the Office was well into contraction, down from 5000 to about 3000 staff [from memory] and we youngsters with either relevant degrees or three very relevant A Levels could see that the previous generation were a mixed bunch, with too many too senior for their ability.
Unseen by aviation, there was a massive and successful investment in research in my formative years; the old-school were weeded out, in-house teaching improved enormously; the Met. Research Flight [flown by RAF] provided detailed knowledge for some brilliant physicists to study, and a host of empirical aids for the man at the bench were produced.
Those old enough to remember will recall the inability to forecast beyond 24 hours, if that ............... contrast now, when successive generations of super-computers [and super scientists, world-beaters] inspire belief in a forecast for beyond five days.
Even in the war years, the presence of a Met Office on a RAF station was usually seen as an asset: it needed to be, because the total cost ended up as a Defence item in the budget.
No weather forecaster I ever met took the job lightly ....... the job was regarded as too serious a burden for anyone younger than 23 years, and any loss of aircraft or aircrew on "our forecast" was a grievous body blow.
"Whem I'm right no-one remembers, when I'm wrong, no-one forgets"