It’s not like there haven’t been clues. Like for example as I pointed out the Arctic Oscillation has gone strongly negative.
The article says:
“The cold weather comes despite the Met Office’s long range forecast, published, in October, of a mild winter. That followed it’s earlier inaccurate prediction of a “barbecue summer”, which then saw heavy rainfall and the wettest July for almost 100 years.”
Excerpts:
Britain is bracing itself for one of the coldest winters for a century with temperatures hitting minus 16 degrees Celsius, forecasters have warned.
They predicted no let up in the freezing snap until at least mid-January, with snow, ice and severe frosts dominating.
And the likelihood is that the second half of the month will be even colder.
Weather patterns were more like those in the late 1970s, experts said, while Met Office figures released on Monday are expected to show that the country is experiencing the coldest winter for up to 25 years.
On New Year’s Day 10 extreme weather warnings were in place, with heavy snow expected in northern England and Scotland.
Despite New Year celebrations passing off mostly unaffected by the weather, drivers in parts of the country, particularly areas of Northumberland, Cumbria and the Scottish Highlands, were warned not to travel unless absolutely necessary.
The continued freezing temperatures did not signal bad news for everyone however. CairnGorm Mountain said it has had its best Christmas holiday season in 14 years.
With heavy snow in the area, the resort said that over a four-day period following Christmas Day it has had more than 8,000 skiers and snowboarders using its runs – including 800 on New Year’s Eve.
h/t to David Corcoran
The MET has about 290 IT staff – supporting about 1,500 – about 1:5 ratio.
They need better quality IT people.
A normal ratio range is 1: 25 to 1:100.
Maybe they have Harry’s problems?
And that is why they do not seem to know what’s up!
What does E.M.Smith have to add?
Well here in Australia the cherry picking season has begun and they are saying climate like the 60s and 70s but 2010 hottest year on record
http://twawki.com/2010/01/02/2010-cherrypicking-season-begins/
Phillip Bratby (12:47:17) :
Sam:
I wonder how Slioch keeps warm then. He couldn’t possibly use fossil fuel derived electricity or burn gas, oil or coal; wind turbines don’t work in cold still air. Perhaps he’s a nuclear fan.
Slioch doesn’t need an external energy supply to keep warm, he just keeps chanting “it’s warming, its warming, its warming” until he succumbs to mild hypothermia and loses rationality. It’s only then that he fires off another post to the Scotsman or Herald, the speed of his typing being just enough to keep him from full onset hypothermia. The process repeats itself, but the long term prognosis is not good.
“The cold weather comes despite the Met Office’s long range forecast, published, in October, of a mild winter. That followed it’s earlier inaccurate prediction of a “barbecue summer”, which then saw heavy rainfall and the wettest July for almost 100 years.”
Getting hard to take these people seriously.
LMAO – particularly considering the amount of resources they have (to accomplish so little).
Redirect ALL of the money-stream to Dr. Piers Corbyn and let him decide how taxpayers’ money should be spent productively on climate research.
UK is becoming a climate laughing-stock.
From the Met Office:
It was their earlier forecast of an 80% chance of mild to normal winter conditions in the UK that led local councils not to be a vigilant and stock up on sufficient amounts of gritting salt for this winter.
Back in July 2009 Piers Corbyn called the Met Office’s winter forecast “reckless misleading nonsense without scientific basis or skill”
There’s some serious housecleaning needed in some of those dinosaur weather agencies. Cut their funding, they are only as good as thier excuses, which are getting very old. Put the money into AccuWeather and WeatherAction.
Of course it will get warmer some time into the future, but that is not today’s business. It’s really getting cold out there.
P Walker, et al
FYI … Greenland temps here:
http://www.wunderground.com/global/GL.html
Three or four stations report to be just at freezing … the rest colder.
Clive
OK, for those who don’t know, I’ve got about 25+years of I.T. experience including titles like Chief Consultant, Director of I.T., etc. I also ran a supercomputer departement for a company with 15,000 (roughly) employees with about half of them in Engineering (i.e. not folks putting together keyboards on a production line… folks who demanded high end I.T. support.) The company will be nameless here, but many of you use their products that are leading edge technically (i.e. high demand for services high performance demanded engineers…) I’ve also done a lot of consulting gigs for high end companies (Schwab, Ericcson, Sun Microsystems – that class.)
I’ve also run my own company for a decade+ and been on the board of directors of another.
I’m going to approach this question as I would a consulting ‘first look’. What are the “big chunks” that shout for a look-see.
Steve J (14:16:50) : The MET has about 290 IT staff – supporting about
1,500 – about 1:5 ratio.
GASP! What in the world are those folks doing? All that can do is cause trouble with that many folks trying to justify their existance and trying to look busy.
They need better quality IT people.
In my experience, it’s the management that’s the issue, not the I.T. staff. They most often are just as agast as the outside observer (and often ‘spill the beans’ to the consultant with the slightest expression of sympathy for their plight…)
A normal ratio range is 1: 25 to 1:100.
Um, er, it depends a lot on the kind of company. If you have a clothing company, for example, the “I.T.” demand really comes from the exec staff and a few clothing designers. Counting the sewing machine folks would give much higher ratios.
That said, the “typical” Super Computer staff is on the order of 200 folks. Yes it can go higher, but it can also go lower. A “highly effective shop” (like the one I ran 😎 he smugly states 😉 can run on a lot less. We ran with a staff of 40 total. That includes the secretary, 2 levels of management, AND supporting all the desktop networking for those (roughly) 8 k “customers” in engineering. That was ‘world record low staffing’ at the time…
(Support of desktops themselves was from another department, but your 25:1 or 100:1 would be about right for that plus business apps.)
What does E.M.Smith have to add?
Glad you value my opinion enough to have sought it out!
Ok, we need to find the actual ‘customer base’ (exclude I.T. guys and janitors…) then find the ratio, then look for ‘excuses’ for an unusual ratio (i.e. clothing factory for low or designing nuclear reactors for high 😉
We also need to look at management “span of control”. One shop floor mananger may be able to supervise 80 sewing machine operators as they all do the same job and don’t need a lot of management input. One CEO might have a full plate with 5 guys each president of a different operating devision with major restructuring issues to work out. “Normal” is about 10. Any deviation from a 10:1 span of control ought to have an explanation attached.
Mal (12:25:45) :
•We employ around 1,800 people at 60 sites across the world, most (about 1,400) working out of our headquarters at Exeter.
•450 work in Research Science
•730 in Forecasting and Observations
•290 in IT
•40 in sales marketing and business development
•280 in corporate and business support functions like Human Resources, Finance, Procurement and Communications
OK, we have 1800 total with 400 being in ‘field offices’. 290 are the I.T. staff and 320 are in “Sales, General Mgt., and Administrative”.
That leaves 1510 as actual “customers” of I.T. but I’m going to make that 1500 to allow for a few janitors, plant waterers, sandwich fetchers, car drivers, whatever.
OK, about that 5:1 ratio. Waayyy out of line. They are most likely pointing at that “industry average of 200” for a supercomputer site to justify this level of staffing. As a first cut, we could put normals around it of 15 to 60 staff. The 15 is likely to be too low, given the nature of the customer base (lots of high demand researchers) but the 60 is quite “doable” (I’ve done it.)
It would require a more in depth look to get finer grained (i.e. does some other agency provide their “desktop support” or their “network support”?) But, bottom line, I’d take a contract to run their shop with a downsizing to about 100 I.T. staff with no more information than this. To commit to a 60 staff, I’d want a bit more information and an idea what budget was available for automating things… (i.e. fully automated self service backups, instead of manual. Tape robot instead of tape hanger operators. etc.)
The “Sales, marketing, business development” is 40:1500 or about 2.5% so that’s a little high, but not too bad (though I question why a government monopoly needs “sales” and “marketing”…)
G&A exclusive of I.T. and Sales / Marketing is 280? 18.7% What Are These Folks Thinking? Look, you have 1180 folks to manage (assuming the I.T. staff includes their managers) so that’s a 4.2 : 1 ratio. Gastly! Even if half of them are things like the “P.R. department” and “H.R.” folks, you still end up with a span of control on the order of 8:1 and I’d really want to know why they need so much “P.R.” support to forcast the weather anyway. With a staff that size, and a 10:1 turnover ratio, they ought to be hiring about 200 people a year. Max. So you need just a couple of H.R. folks. (Heck, you could probably outsource it easily, same thing for “P.R.” and “Communications”).
So I’d say that, off the top, you could prune about 1/2 of the G&A staff with better service as the result.
Finally: 450 researchers and 730 in Forcasting and Obs? For a country that is smaller than California? What are they all doing?
To get the weather right, you need ONE really good met guy, with a support staff of about a dozen. Now, IFF they are operating all the data collection stations too, you might need a couple of hundred guys to run around to them each day… but 730? Really? I smell about a 50% cut as ‘probable’ and more as a possible (but one would really need to look at what services are being provided and with what SLA’s to be sure.)
(Oh, G&A is “General and Adminstrative” – overhead folks. SLA is Service Level Agreement – what you promise to deliver to your customers.)
450 “Researchers”? What in the heck are you researching about the weather that takes 450 folks? Clouds? Wind? Precipitation? Ice? Waves? Temps? Equipment? (I’m running out of ideas here… ). With 10 major areas, that would be 45 researchers per area. As a first guess, I’d say another 1/2 could be pruned from here. Again, SLA’s need to be reviewed, but really…
Unbelievable.
Yup. It would be Very interesting to compare it to the staffing level of other Met Offices in other countries. Norway, Australia, New Zealand, Argentina, Brazil, Germany, Russia, Japan. That would be my “off the cuff” set. A couple with similar sized islands or peninsulas. A couple with similar “world prestige” to guard. A couple with similar Anglo expectations from their weather service. And a couple from the non-similar group just for a full deck.
Just for fun, I’d want to solicit competative bids from Accuweather and Joe Bastardi and ask what their staffing was in the process. I’d then use those bids to:
1) Propose areas to outsource to them.
2) Bludgeon the folks who will scream saying I can NOT cut to that level and have a good product (can you say “existance proof?”… I knew you could…)
3) Have a benchmark for my own self measuring. (i.e. if they are 1000 folks, maybe I need to re-think. If they are under a dozen, maybe I need to re-think. If they are 50 to 100, well, that’s about what I’d expect when you include some operations staff.)
My guess is that you will find much of the world running a far more effective and far lower cost service.
Sidebar: Dear Met Office Supervision,
If you would like my services “cleaning house” I am available at modest rates. This is only my “first blush” look. With about a 1 week “operations review” I can be much more accurate. There may well be things that need keeping that do not show up in a set of ‘simple numbers’ like these, and such legacy operations need to be identified for preservation where appropriate. Yet every organization has obsolete or under performing operations. Should you wish help with this organization, just let the moderators here know. They can reach me if needed.
Sincerely,
E.M.Smith CDP
LPM (12:16:20) :
Oh Really? I just looked up Cairngorm mountain range mentioned in the article in Wikipedia to get a little more background and there is a section titled “Man-Made Threats”
….Other man-made threats include the problems of popularity in a country with limited wilderness resources and a large, relatively affluent urban population. These include various types of recreation and the associated trampling damage and erosion, disturbance, litter and threats to water quality.”
Huh?
The UN and guys like the chairman of the MET tried to get a treaty, United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity, passed the US Congress. The treaty that would herd all humans into small areas and ban them from most areas that would be “rewilded”
“The Wildlands Project would set up to one-half of America into core wilderness reserves and interconnecting corridors (red), all surrounded by interconnecting buffer zones (yellow). No human activity would be permitted in the red, and only highly regulated activity would be permitted in the yellow areas. Four concerned conservative activists who now make up the board of Sovereignty International were able to find UN documentation that proved the Wildlands Project concept was to provide the basis for the UN Convention on Biological Diversity. They used this information and this map produced by Dr. Michael Coffman, editor of Discerning the Times Digest and NewsBytes and CEO of Sovereignty International, to stop the ratification of the treaty an hour before its scheduled cloture and ratification vote…”
http://www.propertyrightsresearch.org/articles2/wildlands_project_and_un_convent.htm
AGW is only one of several “attacks” on human freedom. The more research you do the scarier it gets. The global diversity treaty designed to patent all crop seed is another little known threat backed by the UN.
June 2006 Global Diversity Treaty: “Standard Material Transfer Agreement (SMTA) a standardized contract that will enable much easier access to crop diversity. [ germplasm for patenting] royalty payment (1.1% of sales) is paid only if product is unavailable for further breeding and research. funds will be devoted to conservation efforts.” Translation: Bio-techs Corporations steal seed from third world farmers, patents it and pay money to Bioversity International http://www.bioversityinternational.org/publications/pdf/1144.pdf
FAO is supporting harmonization of seed rules and regulations in Africa and Central Asia in order to stimulate the development of a vibrant seed industry …An effective seed regulation harmonization process involves dialogue amongst all relevant stakeholders from both private and public sectors. Seed quality assurance, variety release, plant variety protection, biosafety, plant quarantine and phytosanitary issues are among the major technical areas of a regional harmonized seed system. The key to a successful seed regulation harmonization is a strong political will of the governments involved” http://www.fao.org/ag/portal/archive/detail/en/?no_cache=1&tx_ttnews%5Btt_news%5D=5730&tx_ttnews%5BbackPid%5D=1886&cHash=7f04326e35
Just what we need 20-30 years of cooler weather and a grab for control of the world food supply. Coincidence? I do not think so.
These are from two years ago:
“….big investors are “hurriedly moving their wealth out of stocks and shares and into farmland….” The Times article suggests that, “Across the world, hedge fund managers, property developers and other investors” are all ready to buy up British farmland.” http://www.deepjournal.com/p/7/a/en/1237.html
“Barton Briggs, one of Wall Street’s most legendary investment strategists, is advising the rich and powerful to buy up farms and stock them with “seed, fertiliser, canned food. wine, medicine. clothes etc.” (and the “etc” would seem to mean guns to keep away the rest of us…)
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601088&sid=almBVle3OMyo&refer=muse
The MET will continue to push AGW because the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity is what the chairman is really after. Humans confined to small areas so they do not “damage or disturb” nature.
Britain is bracing itself for one of the coldest winters for a century, what, like this.
http://i446.photobucket.com/albums/qq187/bobclive/1947winter.gif
Remember that seasonal weather forecasts are based on statistics of earlier years and our knowledge of the parameters that normaly influence the weather for the next few months. But sometimes the weather don’t follow the statistics very well, forming weather systems affect each others and sometimes leads to large changes in the global weather-pattern in just a few weeks. This means that it is quite impossible to make a narrow forcast for the weather two – three months into the future. You can use the information I described above to make a statistical forcast of the weather. The result of a forecast of this type will show a possibility for all kinds of weather. The forecast will say that some weather types will are more likly than others, but doesn´t exclude anything. The forecast may favour mild and rainy weather, but still it will give a possibility for cold and dry.
So I don´t like to criticise the Met Office to much for the cold weather. I don’t remember what was written in the early winter forecast, but I am quite sure they didn´t say that a cold winter was impossible. Probably the forecast said that it was less likly. And even when something is “less likely”, it may still happen.
I hope my descriptions of the sesonal forcasting methods was correct but if I made any error I would be happy if you write a comment on it.
Try Norway then
From the yearly report 2008 (Norwegian)
http://met.no/Om_oss/Arsrapport/filestore/rsrapport_08_Nettversj..pdf
Page 29: “Meteorologisk institutt har 422 årsverk og 441 medarbeidere.”
i.e. the Norwegian Meteorological Institute has 441 employees (equivalent to 422 full time).
Page 25: “IT-divisjonen ved Meteorologisk institutt mål har rundt 55 ansatte med ansvar for meteorologiske systemer, utvikling, instituttets enorme server-park, operativ drift og infrastruktur. Stikkordet er uansett ÅPENT. I alle sammenhenger hvor det er mulig benytter instituttet seg av løsninger basert på åpen kildekode.”
I.e. “The IT division at the Norwegian Meteorological Institute has about 55 employees with responsibility for meteorological systems, development, the department’s huge server park, operation and infrastructure. The key word is OPEN. In all contexts where it is possible, the Institute is using open source based solutions”
Chairman of the Met office = Robert Napier, objective, believer in Empirical and pure science, advocate of ‘peer review’ esp’ at CRU and one of the world true ZEALOTS of AGW.
Nuff said.
•40 in sales marketing and business development
What are they selling? Those little beanies with propellers on top inscribed with the words “Met Office Boffin” ?
I live in Edinburgh, Scotland. We’ve had snow and ice on the ground for 18 days and its snowing again right now. Theres general agreement in the models for at least another 10 days of this level of cold or worse … so we’re looking at a months worse of continuous cold, snow and ice. I fully understand that *our* cold doesn’t match that of our North American cousins, but we’re an island stuck of the NW coast of Europe … our typical average winter climate is like that of Seattle or Vancouver. This spell would be more like southern Norway.
The UK MetOffice hasn’t seen this coming … and worse than that – the day to day forecasting of snow events up here has been abysmal. If they spent more time, money and focus on forecasting WEATHER … rather than what things might be like in 50 years … then they’d be doing their job properly. Sadly, they haven’t.
Mention “Global Warming” on any ice/snow bound street in this city and you’ll be met by ironic laughter … and possibly a punch in the face if this starts to intensify as is forecast.
Richard North from EuReferendum has a good article in the UK’s Mail on Sunday today explaining the reasons for the Met Office’s failings:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1240082/It-gigantic-supercomputer-1-500-staff-170m-year-budget-So-does-Met-Office-wrong.html
Populists start counting with “1”. Number buffs (and computer jocks) start with zero.
crosspatch (11:18:20) :
I don’t know about Denmark but one might be able to walk from Iceland to Greenland soon.
How smooth will the surface be? For quicker travel the use of sail-driven sleds might be considered. After all, the increased use of wind power is being demanded, and PETA does not want our canine cousins to be enslaved for pulling sleds.
The CRU hackers are to blame!
Mike Core (12:34:29) :
“And of course, there is also the real world: Fyvie Loch, – 20 miles north of Aberdeen, is now sufficiently frozen to bear the weight of both a golden retriever and 20 year old son: (I experimented with both specimens on the 31st of Dec)….”
ROFLMAO!
Now that’s true science at work!
Here in the Scottish Borders we are enduring our 22nd day when the temperature has barely risen above zero and we have had continuous snow cover now for 15 days. There is no prospect of any warming in sight until at least the third week in January – and that may not happen. The snow has only been a foot or two deep but the rural backroads are not gritted and are largely only passable by 4WD. If we get even more snow – as is forecast – we will be in deep trouble. Down in Eastern Wales my sister has had 4 feet of snow in less than three days and had to hire a JCB to break a path to the main road. This is serious – the UK is not set-up to cope with such long term cold events; councils don’t have enough road salt or machines to keep all roads open.
“I note the Met office has reviewed it’s prediction for a colder than average winter from 20% to 45%.”
This prediction will be elevated to 100% at the last day of winter. Top gun forecasters, these MET guys.
Phillip Bratby (11:38:22) :
‘Christopher Booker has it all in hand ‘
And Gore changes his mind !!
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/copenhagen/article6959509.ece
Maybe the warming models have contracted a virus. Warm1Cold1.
The local forecasts on the West Coast have gotten erratic.
But, there is a cure for that: Pull the plug and hang a “Closed for ReModeling” sign in the window.
Ahhh the Met Office. The same “experts” who brought us “barbeque summer 2009” and “mild winter 2009/2010”. I would love to do a graph of their “expertise”. My expectation would be as funding and computer power increase, prediction success goes down, as computer models replace common sense.