Do weather forecasters soften heatwave predictions to limit public reaction?

[Wofflewaffle]

Do weather forecasting stations modify their predictions to reduce public action / revolt / outrage?

I'm in France. It's been a dreadful couple of weeks with a long canicule (heatwave), daytime temps up to 40° in the shade and rarely going below 30° at night. It's stifling. Our apartment has been at a steady 29-30° for nearly two weeks now. We don't have aircon and our windows make it very difficult to fit a portable uni.

For several days the forecast said there would be storms and rain on Monday (today) and the tv forecasters were heralding the end of the canicule (for now at least. I was up at 2am this morning and opened the windows - I could smell rain somewhere, there was lightning on the horizon but nothing local. The temperature went down to 26°, with a little fresh air.

Today - back to solid sunshine. It's 6pm, 32 degrees in the shade and 30° in our apartment. All the predicted showers / storms have just evaporated (literally). This happens over and over again on the Metéo France website - stiflingly hot for days, storms / rain predicted - then when it actually comes to that day / time, it just vanishes.

Am I being conspiratorial to think that they are too chicken to give us the true forecast - heatwave conditions for days / weeks to come, with no relief? Becuase people would go fucking insane and, knowing the French, would be out in the streets demanding action.

Ah, I don't know what's behind it but I think at times there's tendency for the Meteo France local forecasts (on the website) to tend towards what people would like...."farrmers near XXXX want rain so we'll start chucking in a probability of that at the 7 day point of the 15 day forecast"..

OTOH from what I remember of the current met situation as covered by the likes of BFM and in some of the press conferences end of last week the forecast was for the heat to come back after some brief storms at some point over the weekend..

That has certainly happened where we are though the temperature is down a bit on last week (currently 30C here).

I was in Zurich last week. The forecast was constantly switching between showers on Saturday to no showers on Saturday.

i presumed the models weren’t clear (and tbf it’s hard to predict where thunderstorms will hit).

loads of flights were delayed on the Sunday because the se of England had thunderstorms on Saturday and lots of flights got delayed or cancelled.

in fact the thunderstorm live map (which I was watching in Zurich hoping for rain) showed a lot of thunderstorms over north France