The Met Office UK summer forecast – Mad Dogs and Englishmen

Chief Meteorologist at the Met Office, Ewen McCallum, said: “After two disappointingly-wet summers, the signs are much more promising this year. We can expect times when temperatures will be above 30 °C, something we hardly saw at all last year.”
The last 30C day in London was July 26, 2006 –
Believe it or not, London is not the only place in the UK. And as for “England” withstanding the Nazis, give us a rest. It’s about as likely to please the rest of the UK as saying that Texas or California or New York defeated the Japanese would please the rest of the USA. Where do Americans (and other foreigners) get this notion that England is the UK? The UK was created in 1707 – at least 70 years before the USA, so it’s hardly a new creation. An American lady I met in Germany said to me when I told her I came from Scotland: “Where’s that”! Help! (She should pay a bit more attention to the background of many of the Founding Fathers.)
As for the people on the BBC who tell us the weather forecast many of them have a background totally outside weather forecasting (degrees in drama and things like that) although some of them have received ‘meterological training’ at the Met Office.
It would have been nice of the Met Office to give us a warning with their forecast for this summer along the lines of “Our forecasts the last two summers have been totally wrong so you can treat this one with a large pinch of salt.”
Having neighbours on either side of me who love BBQs I’ll be quite happy for the Met Office to be as spot on as they have been the last two summers.

Flanagan: “The met predicted 2007 to be the warmest year ever, and what was the result? It’s not discussed in the post.”
The result was that it was not the warmest year ever. Here’s the link in case you are confused:
http://hadobs.metoffice.com/hadcrut3/diagnostics/global/nh+sh/monthly

The Met Office forecast 2007 to be the warmest year ever globally, and a hot summer in the UK.
Instead it turned out to be a cool summer and the rainiest on record in England.
you need to check your facts.
2007 was a hot year in the UK.
Meanwhile, across the UK, 2007 is on course to become one of the warmest years on record. Even if the mean temperature for December is 1 °C below the 1971-2000 long-term average, the year will still be the third warmest since UK-wide records began in 1914. In this 94-year series, the last six years (2002-2007) are set to become the six warmest years.
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/corporate/pressoffice/2007/pr20071213.html
and you can check the seasons and year data for yourself:
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate/uk/anomacts/#
hot spring. normal summer. warm autumn and extremely hot winter. a very hot year in total.
REPLY: Perhaps you missed this “sod”?
The Met Office press release today (quoted in the article) said that summer 2007 and 2008 were disappointingly wet.

Chief Meteorologist at the Met Office, Ewen McCallum, said: “After two disappointingly-wet summers, the signs are much more promising this year. We can expect times when temperatures will be above 30 °C, something we hardly saw at all last year.”

2007 was the wettest summer on record in England.
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/corporate/pressoffice/2007/pr20070831.html
Hey, hows that “Seed Of Doubt – Iraq” blog working out for you? Stamped out the “surge” yet or are you now exclusively a climate troll? 😉 I’ve always found it comical that you doubt what governments have to say about Iraq and the data coming from there, but you’ll accept the weather/climate data purported to show AGW hook line and sinker without question. But you really aren’t worth time arguing with, your position is epoxied in place and secure playing the internet phantom. – Anthony

With the AMO flipping negative I wonder what reality portends. At any rate, the certainty of 50% top tax rates should do something for Britain–make it more ethnically diverse via emigration.

By the way, another intersting study
http://politics.as.nyu.edu/docs/IO/4819/egan_mullin.pdf
people tend to belief in global warming as a function of their local temperature. In cold and temperate places, those supporting global waming are the ones with the highest level of education, whose opinion is relatively constant whatever the local temperatures.

Flanagan wrote:

The met predicted 2007 to be the warmest year ever, and what was the result? It’s not discussed in the post.

Not discussed in the post? You mean you didn’t see the first sentence of the paragraph immediately following that? Here: Instead it turned out to be a cool summer and the rainiest on record in England.

It’ll be a typical British summer – 3 hot days followed by a thunderstorm. As Adam Gallon rightly says, 1976 was quite nice. That had nearly 3 hot months followed by a thunderstorm.

I have just watched the report on this on BBC News at 10. The reporter stated that seasonal forecasts were in their infancy and described them as somewhere between daily forecasts and climate change predictions.
He then went on to report that there was a 35% chance that the forecast was wrong.
Now, if there is a 35% chance the seasonal forecast is wrong… what does that say about the longer projections?

Nicolla Scafettais predicting global cooling till about 2030 – 2040
See:
“Climate Change and Its causes: A Discussion about Some Key Issues” N. Scafetta. Invited author at the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency, DC USA, February 26, 2009. Especially Slide 66. Scafetta finds CO2 sensitivity to be about 1/3 of the IPCC.
In 2001, Don Easterbrook predicted global cooling from about 2007 ’till about 2038 based on the Pacific Decadal Oscillation and glacier trends. That is 2 deg F below the IPCC’s prediction by 2038!
They appear to have better models than the Met.

I wrote this to the Met Office after reading the March 09 criticism of the accuracy of the Winter forecast in “wattsupwitthat”. Their reply is after my posting.
I give them points for their detailed response to my non-friendly analysis
Start 3/5/09 posting to Met Office
To UK Met Office website education email
I wasn’t able to find individuals to contact, just general email addresses.
I found the website to be full of congratulatory information on how well you are doing, how valuable, your work is, and how all doubts about man made global warming has been resolved.
As one who has read the Technical sections of IPCC reports, which are replete with qualifications about how much more we need to understand, the Met Office website reads like a catechism of MMGB (man made global warming) Believers.
I have two scientific degrees. But more importantly, in high school, I learned how true scientific method is always challenging and examining the data to make sure its theories and hypothesis can stand.
No deviation from doctrine, no heretical qualifications, absolute religious fervor about the True Path.
An yet, the Path lead to false doctrine in that it predicted the coming of the Messiah (increasingly hotter summers and warmer winters) and missed the coldest winter in 13 years.
The UK Met Office famously forecast this past winter to be “milder than average.“
25 September 2008
The Met Office forecast for the coming winter suggests it is, once again, likely to be milder than average.
Seasonal forecasts from the Met Office are used by many agencies across government, private and third sectors to help their long-term planning.
The meteorological winter is over, and the official results are in :
The UK had its coldest winter for 13 years, bucking a recent trend of mild temperatures, the Met Office has said.
The average mean temperature across December, January and February was 3.1C – the lowest since the winter beginning in 1995, which averaged 2.5C.
This missed forecast falls on the heels of two consecutive incorrect summer forecasts , both of which were forecast to be warm but turned out to be complete washouts. However, the Met Office appears undaunted by their recent high profile forecasting failures, and they continue in their quest to educate the public about the imminent threat of global warming. (end)
4/29/09 Below is the Met Office response to my criticism. jgf
REF0002867
Dear Mr Fox
Thank you for your e-mail of 5 March 2009 regarding climate change and Met Office seasonal forecasts, in particular for the winter just passed. I apologise for the delay in replying to you.
Seasonal forecasting is still a developing area for the Met Office and should still be considered experimental, although we would hope they are becoming increasingly reliable. Their “target audience” is, to a large extent, government planners and we have received much positive feedback from those customers who have used them over the last few years. That said we hope members of the public find them useful as well and we are pleased to note your interest.
Seasonal trends in weather affect large geographic areas, so the seasonal forecast for the UK is set in the broader context of Europe as a whole. We are also looking at trends over a longer period – the actual weather will be subject to many sub-regional and local variations.
Whilst it is true that the first forecast for winter 2008-2009 thought it more likely that temperatures would be close to average or a little above average, though we foresaw that this winter would be less mild than last year. This was the best forecast possible from the information available to us at that time. Subsequent updates modified this forecast to indicate the likelihood of colder temperatures at the start of winter, and more recently persisting through January and February.
Clearly we would have liked to have given earlier indication of the colder temperatures experienced in most parts of the UK during December and January. Forecasts for further ahead are looking at the likelihood of future event occurring among other possibilities – so are by their nature much more general and subject to change. Certainly, long range forecasts are not the appropriate place to try to predict individual weather events, such as the unusually severe frosts experienced in the early weeks of January or the recent disruptive snowfall in southern and eastern England and later in northern England and parts of Scotland. However, in these cases we were able to issue forecasts well in advance which successfully predicted where the major risk of disruption would be, due to improvements to our numerical weather prediction (NWP) models in recent years.
Because of these forecasts, we were able to provide essential, timely advice to the emergency services and our other government and commercial customers. For individual weather events the best advice we can give is to continue to keep up to date with our forecasts for up to five days ahead via radio, television and our web site. Colleagues will obviously be looking to further improve the usefulness of seasonal forecasts as these develop in the future.
I can assure you that no Met Office forecast is governed by any other consideration than the information available, certainly not the need to “prove” or otherwise the case for or against human induced climate change, which we firmly believe has been established. The Met Office is a scientific organisation which bases its decisions, conclusions and forecasts on established evidence and facts. The Met Office Hadley Centre is the UK’s national centre for climate change research. Partly funded by Defra (the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs), the newly-established Department of Energy and Climate Change and the Ministry of Defence, the Hadley Centre provides in-depth information to the Government and advise them on climate change issues using expert scientific evidence. Our climate scientists undertake studies of the global climate using similar, though more extensive, models of the atmospheres, as are used for the prediction of weather conditions.
The issues you raise around climate change and many others have been comprehensively addressed in the peer reviewed scientific literature. This information is freely available in the public domain, including, as you have correctly referred to, from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) who have produced a detailed list of FAQs at http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/wg1-report.html. The Met Office Hadley Centre publication “Climate Change and the greenhouse effect: a briefing from the Hadley Centre” is also available to download free of charge at http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/hadleycentre/pubs/brochures/ and you may also find the following news release on the Met Office web site helpful: http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/corporate/pressoffice/2008/pr20080923c.html.
Whilst we would agree that areas of uncertainty remain, the overwhelming scientific consensus is that human induced climate change is real and poses a serious threat. In its Fourth Assessment Review, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) stated that there is unequivocal evidence from observations that the Earth is warming. It further stated and that most of the observed warming since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in man-made greenhouse gas concentrations. By “very likely”, the IPCC means a 90% probability or greater. This broad climate change message has also been strongly supported by the world’s top Academy of Sciences, including the Royal Society in the UK and the National Academy of Sciences in the USA.
The national science academies of the G8 nations and Brazil, China and India, three of the largest emitters of greenhouse gases in the developing world, have signed a statement on the global response to climate change. The statement stresses that the scientific understanding of climate change is now sufficiently clear to justify nations taking prompt action and calls on world leaders to take such action.
In view of this, the Met Office firmly believes that climate research has captured the essential aspects of what is causing our planet to warm. It is now time to move on and look at strategies for adaptation and mitigation; better defining uncertainty and improving regional detail in climate models. This is where our efforts will and should be directed.
Our seasonal forecast was the best possible from the information available to us but we are aware that as conditions change there would be the need for updates, which is what we have done. We will obviously look to develop and improve these forecasts over the years to come, as we have with our shorter range forecasts. A forecast for, or weather conditions experienced during an individual season neither proves or disproves a case for climate change, which is already firmly established.
Thank you for your interest and for taking the time to contact the Met Office.
Yours sincerely
Martin Kidds Customer Feedback Manager
Met Office FitzRoy Road Exeter Devon EX1 3PB United Kingdom
Tel: 0870 900 0100 or +44 (0)1392 88 5680 Fax: +44 (0)1392 88 5681
E-mail: enquiries@metoffice.gov.uk http://www.metoffice.gov.uk

And if ever the UK Met Office supercomputer is wrong:
“Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them… well, I have others.”
Groucho Marx
US comedian with Marx Brothers (1890 – 1977)

Piers Corbyn has written to HM Environment Secretary Hilary Benn MP
27th April 2009, offering “Long Range Flood Forecasts to assist Flood Warnings for the UK” to improve their forecasting.