Two of Hungary’s top weather experts have been sacked after they gave the wrong forecast that resulted in political uproar.
On Saturday (21 August), the country organised ‘Europe's biggest fireworks display’ to celebrate its national holiday, St Stephen’s Day.
According to reports, some 40,000 fireworks were lined up ready to be launched from 240 points along a three-mile stretch of the Danube River in central Budapest.
However, seven hours before the display was scheduled start, the government postponed the event, citing extreme weather warnings.
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But it appears the weather warnings were premature as the weather in fact stayed rather calm after the rainstorm changed direction and struck parts of eastern Hungary instead.
In light of the furore, the National Meteorological Service posted a public apology on its Facebook page on Sunday (21 August), explaining that the 'least likely' outcome happened, and that uncertainty is part of weather forecasting
But it was too late, the damage was done as the mistaken forecast has now resulted in the sackings of the head and deputy head of the weather service.
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Innovation Minister Laszlo Palkovics confirmed on Monday (22 August) that NMS chiefs, Kornelia Radics and Gyula Horvath, had been fired with immediate effect, but with no explanation.
However, the public’s reaction to the fireworks fiasco has been mixed as almost 100,000 people had signed a petition, calling for the fireworks to be cancelled due to the war in neighbouring Ukraine, and austerity at home.
But government supporters were furious at the experts mistake, and hope the display will now go ahead as planned on Saturday, 27 August.
Meanwhile, if you’ve not had enough of the high temperatures this summer, you can look forward to another period of good warm weather coming up over the August bank holiday weekend for much of the UK.
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So, whilst we’ve seen some genuinely scary temperatures around much of the country of late, it’s still nice to get a bit of summer sun and decent temperatures for being outside and enjoying ourselves.
According to those meteorological boffins down at the Met Office, the last long weekend of the summer could see the mercury climbing once again.
In fact, the UK could be even hotter than Mexico City at some points, which is unusual even for this time of year.
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Nicola Maxey from the Met Office told the Sun: "Temperatures are not going to be as hot as we saw in July or earlier this month, but it looks like we're going to have a nice, settled warm spell for the end of the summer.
"There's certainly high indications at the moment that we're going to see high pressure build which could bring some more settled dry, sunny weather for parts of the country."
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Lisa McLoughlin