Originally Posted by
Omegstrat6
My understanding is that the majority, if not all, of the weather presenters on the BBC have a background in meteorology and that all would at least have had relevant training at the Met Office. I suppose that then lends a certain element of trust/authority in as much as they should be at least seen as being qualified to present the weather just as key news readers might be expected to have a background in journalism/reporting. I take your point though as these particular presenters may have little personal involvement in producing the actual forecasts even if they have a much better understanding of them than Joe public. As such, it may well be the case that the majority of such weather presenters then do little more than just that and that money could be saved by getting the main presenters to do the job instead once they had had some training to cover the basics. I don't think it's likely to happen though, partly because of the trust element where people assume weather presenters are qualified experts and partly simply because of the long standing tradition of the format of having a separate weather presentation.
As for the actual forecasts, I believe the BBC buys the data for their weather forecasts from the Met Office as well as from other weather monitoring/forecasting groups and then a small group of in-house meteorologists refine that data to produce the presentations we get.
Don't know about the so called regional "specialist" reporters for health, politics etc. I assume they are all proper journalists with particular interests in these fields and that they do far more work behind the scenes before any brief report hits the screens or airways but if there is no news, there is no news so don't know how they are paid or what they are paid for. They may only have part time or short term contracts where they are only paid for pieces used or possibly be part of the Local Democracy Reporting Service which is part funded by the BBC to help support regional journalism and as such they may also work for other local media outlets and be paid by the LDRS rather than by the BBC directly? Either way, you would very much like to think that they weren't paid by the BBC to do nothing!