-80C in the Cairngorms? BBC app glitch makes Highlands colder than Antarctica...
Eagle-eyed weather watchers were left scratching their heads this evening when the BBC weather app falsely suggested Aviemore will be colder than Antarctica this weekend.
In something that feels straight out of the disaster movie The Day After Tomorrow, the BBC app was erroneously predicting Aviemore's mercury could plunge to a whopping -71C on Saturday night!
And it's not even the coldest location being 'forecast' – with the temperature 'predicted' to plummet to -80C in Braemar. To put that into context, the average winter temperature at the South Pole is around -49C, and the coldest Antarctic temperature ever recorded was -89.6C.
These two Highland communities weren't alone in posting weird and wacky predictions for Saturday either – with Kingussie (-60C), Grantown (-38C) and Newtonmore (-31C) all showing predictions that'd absolutely obliterate the coldest ever UK temperature by a considerable margin... if they came to pass.
Certainly puts the 'Beast from the East' into perspective...
The obvious glitch is not the first time the BBC's weather app has gone on the blink this year, with strange anomalies in June suggesting the UK's temperatures would peak at just 7C at the same time that a record-breaking heatwave was sweeping across much of Europe
On that occasion the BBC blamed a third party supplier for the problem. If this repeat is due to the same cause, then one imagines the reception the third-party supplier will be getting tonight may be about as chilly as their forecast temperatures...