Final Score For The Met Office Winter Forecast

The Met Office’s seasonal forecasts are used by the energy companies and government to plan contingencies.
The energy companies use these forecasts to determine energy usage from which flows figures on energy storage and costs to consumers.
Government bodies determine contingency plans for heath (e.g. hypothermia rates), transport infrastructure (salt and grit for roads), etc.
This cold winter coupled with rising energy costs in the UK has cost huge sums of money and many lives, unnecessarily so.
The Met Office’s fixation with Global Warming has resulted in misery and pain for people. There should be sackings at the Met Office.

I love it! “Global warming had prevented this winter from being even colder.” There could be glaciers rolling over Inverness, and they’d tell us without global warming they’d have reached Glasgow.

Yes well never mind the details, the predictions are far more important.
With the rough weather hitting larger parts of northern England, Wales, Northern Ireland, & Scotland does this classify as a direct hit/near miss from Piers Corbyn & the Weather Action team who predicted a heavy storm for that region in very early March?
I think that, to be fair to the Met Office, they are always little over cautious as they have always been the butt of jokes about weather forecasting here in the UK ever since I can remember. Their biggest issue & embarrassment was when in late 1988 poor old Ian MacCaskell was giving an evening forecast about heavy storms over large parts of south-east of England, & he even commented on a call from a viewer claiming that they had heard another forecast from Europe about a possible hurricane hitting the south-east, which he unfortunately appeared to almost laugh off, he still laughs about it & puts his hand up such is his integrity & professionalism. We all in the UK know what happened there & I remember waking up to several downed trees in the local park which our house overlooked. They have never lived it down & I think this has been part of the issue. They rather tended to use a shot-gun technique & cover all bases for a time just so that they could not & would not be subjected to the national humiliation that followed the hurricane of 1988. Now they perhaps have the budget & equipment they craved for many years but never got, of course they are now far more politicised & riddled with green subverts, with people all to eager to follow their political masters policies.
As to their current commentary, I really don’t know how long the pretence & farsical rhetoric can continue without people turning away in droves from their apparent authority, as more & more claims are made that cooling equals warming, that everything that happens weather wise & climate wise, is evidence of Global Warming/Climate Change, & that whatever seems to happen with those imposters, is “entirely consistent with their understanding of cimate change”. HIWTYL. We’ve even seen the horses mouth in the form of Dr Pope come out & claim that “climate alarmism” is doing a disservice to climate change, & that the melting Arctic icepack could be entirley due to natural variations as pointed out by WUWT recently. Pull the other one, I’m too old for that gag! They are not quite a national embarrassment, but as time goes on, I believe they will become that once again, very sadly!
BTW I missed the snow as I was in the shower, but my wife assured me that it happened albeit for a short while! The sky is blue & clear, & sunny, for the moment.
OT, & this could well be for Lief Svalgaard/David C. Archibald, the present reduced solar activity appears to be matched from what I have read so far, by a cycle in 1913 or was it 1900, certainly 1913 would fit with the point I am trying to make? I understand that the Gliessberg cycle has a periodocity of 88 years with a range of 70-100 years, & therefore is it this cycle that could be taking place in the sun now? Is there any evidence that something significant happens within the sun every fourth Hale cycle, & what if any corresponding effects were obseved on planet Earth?

That was Michael Fish, not Ian McCaskell and it was October 1987, not 1988, and it was not a hurricane by the standard definition, though did have hurricane force winds.
Regards
Andy

You people are letting the cat out of the bag here, this is all top secret. The Met Office is a subsidiary of the UK ministry of Defence and as such the Queens minister John Hutton has a duty to defend Britain. Imagine if the evil Spaniards and their armada had a true picture of the weather around the British Isles.
I might have the wrong Elizabeth but what the hell, it feels like 1588.

TonyB: Where can I find reference to the removal of laws in England mandating in-wall plumbing (as the climate had warmed enough to prevent external plumbing freezing); and subsequently the re-introducution of those laws because the climate had gone back to cold?
I think it may have been around the time of Dickens.

Alan the Brit (01:51:00) wrote: …Met Office, they are always little over cautious as they have always been the butt of jokes about weather forecasting here in the UK…
And weather forecasters the world over, Alan. It’s a part of the conversation just like my operation and other such scintillating wit and wisdom…

Forecasting is based on the data of past events. But if the only data you have to work with is the last 2 or 3 hundred years and the climate is going through a cycle that is longer then that then of course you will be wrong. We are entering a Dalton or Maunder Minimum, or perhaps something worse. The lack of sunspots tell us that. But what causes the sun to have fewer sunspots? Why is this periodic, but not predictable? There are people out there that have ideas on this, are those ideas being examined? I personally think that the concept that man has so much power that we focus, almost solely, on our debate on anthropogenic global warming is the height of egocentric mania. I look out at the solar system, the galaxy and the universe and I think: “.. makes one feel rather insignificant doesn’t it?” Come on guys think, get your head out your ass, take your hand out of the government cookie jar and be a “scientist” for a change.

Not only have the Met missed the seasonal forecast, but their monthly forecast for February (BBC website, about 1 week into the month) was a bust. This was just at the end of the last really cold and snowy spell, and stated that the weather systems looked set to continue in a cold and snowy pattern for much of the month – so anyone care to guess what the weather for the 2nd half of February was?
Yep, a bit warmer than average, with relatively little rainfall.

Sven, in the period in question the anomaly has varied between 0.27 and 0.47 so a mean forecast error of 0.06C is pretty good, in fact is is less than one standard deviation of the anomalies for this period.