While England basks in a winter wonderland, with more on the way, and bookmakers are now slashing odds on a white Christmas (The Times reports “The odds on a White Christmas fell to match the lowest price ever offered at 6/4 today”.), it seems like a good time to review the Met Office forecast for the coming year.
The Met Office is forecasting 2010 to be the warmest year ever, due to El Nino. The moderate El Nino we have now appears to be weakening, with additional weakening in the next few months.
The Met Office did the same kind of forecast in 2007, right before the temperature dropped more than 1C. The UAH (Channel5 LT) temperature has dropped this past week and is the closest to the 20 year average it has been in six months. With these factors in play, has the Met Office has made a serious blunder with their current high visibility forecast? Is it a repeat of the now famously wrong Met Office BBQ summer forecast?
See the 2007 Met Office forecast here:
4 January 2007
2007 – forecast to be the warmest year yet
2007 is likely to be the warmest year on record globally, beating the current record set in 1998, say climate-change experts at the Met Office.
Each January the Met Office, in conjunction with the University of East Anglia, issues a forecast of the global surface temperature for the coming year. The forecast takes into account known contributing factors, such as solar effects, El Niño, greenhouse gases concentrations and other multi-decadal influences. Over the previous seven years, the Met Office forecast of annual global temperature has proved remarkably accurate, with a mean forecast error size of just 0.06 °C.
See the 2009 (for 2010) forecast here:
Climate could warm to record levels in 2010
10 December 2009
A combination of man-made global warming and a moderate warming of the tropical Pacific Ocean, a phenomenon known as El Niño, means it is very likely that 2010 will be a warmer year globally than 2009.
Recently released figures confirm that 2009 is expected to be the fifth-warmest year in the instrumental record that dates back to 1850.
The latest forecast from our climate scientists, shows the global temperature is forecast to be almost 0.6 °C above the 1961–90 long-term average. This means that it is more likely than not that 2010 will be the warmest year in the instrumental record, beating the previous record year which was 1998.
Here are some video’s from England that give some idea of the snowstorm:
Anthony,
OT… The youtube video is innappropriate for younger viewers due to excessive foul language. Are you sure you want this on your blog?
Thank you!
The Met Office Winter forecast covers Dec 2009 to Feb 2010.
The UK average for December to February from 1971-2000 is 3.7 °C.
LONDON, Nov 27 – The UK’s official weather watcher the Met Office forecast on Friday there was a 50 percent chance of a warmer winter than average this year for northern Europe, including Britain.
The Met Office said there was only a 20 percent chance of a colder winter, while there were no clear signals for precipitation during the three months between December and February.
So they have hedged their bets on this one, but my view is that we’ll be about the same or slightly colder than the winter was 2008/2009. This forecast was done by just observing nature – no £3.5bn computer required.
Meth office..
I just finished reviewing the Obama speech. I was jumping for joy because BO decided to read the BLUE script, as I 100% knew he would, and seal his fate as a one term President. BO took the blue Pill as I knew he would, because that’s just the way they are. Did you notice he was also wearing a blue tie? Did you also notice he didn’t read from his teleprompter? Maybe I got to them with my Red teleprompter Blue teleprompter comment.
Phrase of the day:
“common but differentiated responsibility”
Definition: a shared responsibility that must be borne by one party more than another based on a non sequitur.
Example: Al Gore
Expect to see this used a lot in the future
Fred from Canuckistan . . . (11:12:03) :
You folks ‘cross the pond there . . . . you folks in England . . . .keep this up and you’ll soon qualify for honourary Canuckistani status.
You’ll love playing hockey & lacrosse. So much more fun than your football 🙂
What is it we ‘have to keep up’?
Those of us that went to fancy schools played field hockey. Lax is only for girls over here!
HAND!
Robert Wykoff (10:45:15)
“How is 2009 the 5th warmest “ever ?”
good question, but nothing extraordinary, we are around a cyclical high due to ocean currents similar to the high in the 1930s, so all highest temperatures should be around now and then just for natural variability.
additionally current temperatures appear to be biased towards warming because:
– satellite data show approx. 0.5 deg/century less warming, though the troposphere should warm more and not less
– uhi is not corrected in CRU (only increases error bars) and NOAA. GISS correction doesn’t work outside the US, as there are as many upward as downward corrections.
– station selection and adjusted data appear to be biased towards warming at least for siberia, northern europe, africa, australia and antarctica.
– ocean temperature adjustments appear to be biased towards warming due to upward step functions when data series where spliced.
all together, it is “very likely”, that current temperatures are reported several tenths of a degree to high, making it “probable”, that the warmest year on recent record was in the 1930s.
Perhaps someone made a stop at London. Wanna know the Piers Corbyn method?
Easy: He just looks at Al Gore travel agenda.
Is there some reason they are using the 1961-1990 average? Seems like you pick up quite a bit of the cold period, but exclude the warmer 90’s, thus making the anomaly look greater that it otherwise would be?
Cassandra King (10:17:08) :
That was spot on! Really good, I could not agree more and I could not have put it better myself.
But when you call the Met Office a scientific institution:
“The met office has gone from a scientific institution to a propaganda mouthpiece”
I think you should say:
“The met office has gone from a Department of the Ministry of Defence to a propaganda mouthpiece”
Met Office – along with the MSM – is PsyOps. The whole thing is, a psychological operation. These people know exactly what they are doing.
Please do not any of you allow the wool be pulled over your eyes.
It’s a psychological war. It’s being fought in people’s minds.
The Met Office is obviously extremely busy as the have not found the time since 13th Dec to update the Hadley Centre’s CET daily running record. This often occurs when a series of colder days would cause a higher temperature anomaly to be downgraded. And there I was waiting for the anomaly to turn negative ( which must now be the case) – I feel cheated and I bet they have the weekend off!
There’s actually little criticism of the Met Office in our press (just grumblings). But talk to people and everyone thinks they are completely useless. You should see the weather reports. What they do is add-in lots of ‘possibly’, ‘maybe’, ‘chance of’, ‘could be’ – so they can’t be wrong. It’s hilarious to listen to – and useless.
BBC weather forecast presenter the other night. “The last time it snowed was February, which is quite a long time ago”. Compared to what, June? Did it used to snow between the winters before we warmed the world up? I’m confused.
Message to all Brits:
See what a success George Brown and his Miliband of Brothers were at the Copenhagen anti-global warming conference? Politicians of stupendous reach, I’d say.
John at 10:21noted that the MET has been wrong about Summer for the past three years. I recall them later one summer (not hot, not dry, apparently the usual British summer) trying to avoid admitting their mistake by saying, in essence, “well, we predicted that might happen, too…” Quacks.
Well, credit where credit is due. This has been the warmest decade of the past 10 years. At least they got that one right.
More seriously, with the AMO starting to go into the down phase, I would imagine that these sorts of snowstorms are more likely to be the case in the years to come.
Unfortunately now a 2 inch snow fall in the UK now comes with a ‘severe weather warning’ so its not surprising ‘imminent death warnings’ are issued if the outlook is slightly inclement for the time of year.
I blame the soft southerners.
Too high, Cassandra. I’ll go 12.8 m km2.
The house always wins in the long run. A few more “corrections” and “adjustments” are all that’s needed.
Robert Wood (12:09:59)
“Politicians of stupendous reach, I’d say.”
Yeah, and in Scotland we’ve got Alex Salmond swanning off to global-criminal-crime-syndicate-hagen (despite not being invited), while a Scottish airline company goes bust due to, essentially, a cash flow problem, leaving thousands of holidaymakers stranded and over 500 people without a job.
Hope he’s proud of himself.
Disgusted.
They release their pronouncements on the current year in Dec for effect, its based on Jan to Sept data so is only 75% of the data not 11/12ths as you would think. They always overstate the temp and when the final full year data is announced in Mar Apr with the lower figure its hidden away. The BBC never goes back to change the orginal notice.
mikey (10:17:59) :
Same thing happened in Seattle, Washington last year. Huge blizzard, tons of snow, and no snow plows. To top it off, the city has rules against run-off into Puget Sound, so they couldn’t de-ice the streets with salt or chemicals. The whole city ground to a halt for a few days.
The current blizzards were accurately predicted by Piers Corbyn at Weather Action:
http://www.weatheraction.com/docs/WANews09No100.pdf
Have a look and see if he’s right about the rest of the month. I think he’s got something.
Not above freezing all day here in East England – and that hasn’t happened for a while. No doubt the Met Office are too busy at Copenhagen to bother with accurate long distance forecasting.
“The power grid unit of French utility giant Electricite de France SA (EDF.FR) warned Monday that electricity demand could surge to surpass record highs in France this week due to the cold and said it will import power from abroad to help meet demand.”
“”At this time of year, a drop of one degree Celsius in temperature causes an increase of around 2,100 megawatts of consumption, double the consumption in the city of Marseilles,” the company said.”
http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20091214-710066.html
Today 4 days later most of Europe is under a deep freeze, with Paris reporting -4C in the early evening, forecasted to drop to -6C, the average low being 2C. Similar temp conditions are forecast for the next 2 days, or colder, with rain and snow possible thru to Xmas.