From the London Times, signs that the Met Office might need a refresher course in basic forecasting skills and bonuses revoked. While I’m often critical of NOAA’s climate issues, the forecasts from NOAA put The Met Office to shame in terms of accuracy and detail. And, NOAA staffers don’t get bonuses, period.
Excerpts from the Times article by Steven Swinford
BUFFETED by complaints about its inaccurate weather forecasts, the Met Office now faces being dumped by the BBC after almost 90 years.
The Met Office contract with the BBC expires in April and the broadcaster has begun talks with Metra, the national forecaster for New Zealand, as a possible alternative.
The BBC put the contract out to tender to ensure “best value for money”, but its timing coincides with a storm over the Met Office’s accuracy.
Last July the state-owned forecaster’s predictions for a “barbecue summer” turned into a washout. And its forecast for a mild winter attracted derision when temperatures recently plunged as low as -22C.
Last week the Met Office failed to predict heavy snowfall in the southeast that brought traffic to a standstill. This weekend a YouGov poll for The Sunday Times reveals that 74% of people believe its forecasts are generally inaccurate.
By contrast, many commercial rivals got their predictions for winter right. They benefit from weather forecasts produced by a panel of six different data providers, including the Met Office.
Despite criticism, staff at the Met Office are still in line to share a bonus pot of more than £1m. Seasonal forecasts, such as the one made in September, are not included in its performance targets.
John Hirst, the chief executive of the Met Office, insisted last week that recent forecasts had been “very good” and blamed the public for not heeding snow warnings. He received a bonus of almost £40,000 in 2008-09.
Metra already produces graphics for the BBC, including the 3-D weather map that made some viewers feel sick when it was introduced in 2005. Weather Commerce, Metra’s UK subsidiary, has already usurped the Met Office in supplying forecasts to Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Marks & Spencer and Waitrose.
…
The Met Office was bullish, though, saying: “We have always been in the strongest position to provide the BBC with accurate and detailed weather forecasts and warnings for the UK.”
h/t to many WUWT readers
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O/T, but worthy of a new thread? – more shoddy pronouncements from IPCC
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6991177.ece
The Met office short range forecast is pretty accurate, but not only is their long range estimate poor I don’t think their hurricane forecasting is as good as the USA based ones.
Andy
Commercial customers actually care about forecast accuracy and value for money – hence it seems the Met Service has already lost them.
The obvious solution is for the government to sell the Met Service to Metra – saving heaps of money for the UK taxpayer and greatly improving forecasting services at the same time.
And as a bonus we’ll all get some relief from a major source of AGW alarmism.
John Wright (20:05:54) :
Is Metra doing better than Corbyn?
By the way, Tokyoboy, “forecast” used in the past tense was OK.
The MET office does a lot of that.
Another vote for Corbyn here. He’s on the warpath because the BBC promised to revisit his winter prediction if it was right and the MET was wrong. It was, they were, and the beeb hasn’t.
Perhaps the BBC should use some more traditional methods of predicting the weather.
http://www.rcn27.dial.pipex.com/cloudsrus/lore.html
You never know might be more accurate than the met.
A long range forecaster here in Australia, by name Indigo Jones, was much heeded by the farming community during the 1930-40s. He forecast the big droughts of 1980-82 and the centenary drought 2000-2007. He couldn’t say how long each would run for but he did say they would both be very severe.
He had no knowledge of GW, A or nay, nor did he have access to GISStemps and satellites. His main forecasting tool was sun cycles and historical data. The recent drought in SE Australia, still going in some places, has been claimed by the PM and warmers as proof of AGW. Strange that a man could predict it 60 years ago not knowing the world was at a tipping point etc etc.
A while ago here I suggested that the UK government put the forecasting job out for bids as a way to get the Met Office to get serious. They haven’t, but at least we now know the BBC reads WUWT. Happy to have helped, Beeb.
Wishful thinking. The BBC is just going through the motions of a competitive tender.
The top man at the Met Office was interviewed by the BBC and blandly said it was more difficult to predict short term than 50+ years into the future.
The BBC interviewer of course nodded sagely without thinking about how this preposterous claim could be tested.
The short term solution it seems is to say – ‘well it might snow but there is a 40% chance it won’t.’ Can anybody tell me how this sort of non-forecast can help any of us?
The BBC is inhabited by left wing thickos. They want the met office to tell them what they want to be told. They want to be confirmed in their prejudice.
Let’s be fair, the MET Office do a reasonable job in forecasting weather for up to five days, which is their main purpose.
What’s turning them into a joke is their obsession with seasonal forecasts, which always sound more like a mantra for AGW:
Global Warming, global warming!
We’re in for a record hot summer.
We’re in for a record mild winter.
As for the possibility of the BBC cutting their link with the MET Office –
NO CHANCE!
That’s my forecast for 2010.
That is wrong thing to do. No private or alternative supplier has resources of Met office.
What is required is complete clean up of ‘politicos’ running it, true expertise allowed to work without interference, if need be brought in from outside. Then Met office would be what it claims to be, but sadly it is not.
“geronimo (22:14:46) :
[…]
I noted the other day that the Guardian, right there with the BBC on AGW is now using Accuweather.”
The AGW cultists will not even see this as bigotry. After all, it’s only a weather forecast, short term in nature. At the same time, the high priests at the Met will have more time to prove the long term meltdown. It’s like attacking people for wearing furs while wearing leather boots yourself.
Leftists can maintain contradictory attitudes for quite a while until it makes them crack and they defect to the sceptics camp only to be replaced by younger leftists. Hansen is quite resilient in this respect but it’s obvious that it’s taking its toll on him. Same for Lovelock. You can literally watch them go insane. Or take Mojib Latif: He predicts something very similar to Joe D’Aleo but as soon as a newspaper quotes him he has to explain that he’s been misinterpreted.
They all started out sane and look what became of them. Look at what’s left of the BBC.
Holy cow !
I just realized that if the Met loses the BBC contract, then James Cameron will be able to rent their big zillion £ superdupercomputer and we’ll have Avatar 2 in the theatres in three weeks.
So what if it browns out half of Devon and the Avatar characters have one-dimensional personalities? You gotta make sacrifices to achieve greatness.
Reply: Weta studios probably already has them beat, with double the number of processors, 8 times the RAM, and 6 times the storage space as the initial Met office installation. ~ ctm
Apologies for overworking the moderator, but I found this advert on the Guardian Monbiot page for a garden leaf vacuum.
http://www.guardianoffers.co.uk/mall/productpage.cfm/GuardianOffers/_TRUELV1/-/Eckman-Wheeled-Garden-Leaf-Vacuum%2C-Blower-%26amp%3B-Shredder
I wonder how it works with snow?
When they get it wrong do they give the money back?
Firstly, come on guys, the “Met” is short for Metropolitan Police, in London. The “Met Office” is shor for the Meterological Office! Just don’t want you guys to fall prey to some little nerd who wants to belittle your argument by being pickie!
Oh & as for the 5 day Met Office forecasts, yes they aren’t bad, but if you’re a pickie little nerd like me, you’ll notice that as they progress, they often change ever so slightly as what happened turns into what’s happening! Perhaps it’s me.
Peirs Corbyn has my vote & has done so for some time. However as others have said, this may be window dressing & going thro’ the motions only just to seem to be doing something, in practice it probably won’t happen as the political ramifications are enormous, opening things up wider than would be liked! We’ll see.
What a surprise from the Beeb. Here is a little something for those who hold a religious belief in super computer models.
25 September 2008
The Met Office forecast for the coming winter suggests it is, once again, likely to be milder than average. It is also likely that the coming winter will be drier than last year.
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/corporate/pressoffice/2008/pr20080925.html
25 Feb 2009
Coldest winter for a decade – Met Office
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/corporate/pressoffice/2009/pr20090225.html
—–
30 April 2009
The coming summer is ‘odds on for a barbecue summer‘, according to long-range forecasts
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/corporate/pressoffice/2009/pr20090430.html
Met Office cools summer forecast
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8173533.stm
—-
2009
Met office forecast a mild to average winter
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/science/creating/monthsahead/seasonal/2009/winter.html
Met Office – 5 January 2010
“The current cold weather started in mid December and it has been the most prolonged spell of freezing conditions across the UK since December 1981.”
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/corporate/pressoffice/2010/pr20100105.html
“Britain’s freezing weather: worst snow for 50 years”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/topics/weather/6939124/Britains-freezing-weather-worst-snow-for-50-years-paralyses-transport-networks.html
——
10 December 2009
Climate could warm to record levels in 2010
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/corporate/pressoffice/2009/pr20091210b.html
The Met Office predicted the near opposite to what occurred for the wet summers 2007, 2008, and 2009, the icy snowy winter 08/9, and world temperature decline over recent years.
vukcevic (03:08:44) :
That is wrong thing to do. No private or alternative supplier has resources of Met office. etc.
It is not having the resources, yes, it is what you do with them that counts.
Working in a very “get it done” environment with many different collaborations is interesting. You get to compare how different organisations work. Anything linked with “the state” is, in my experience, not efficient. In the name of efficiency, work has become target driven, but the targets are wrong, and have become an end in themselves rather than a means to an end. The term “value added” has been introduced, without considering what value (if any) is added or at what cost. I despair.
The second part of your comment, I also agree with – completely.
One aspect that I have not seen mentioned. I am fairly sure that in past years, the UK Met. Office has waited until it has all the data from the previous year, before making a forecast for the coming year. Typically, the December data comes by the third week in January, so it is towards the end of January that the next year’s forecast is made.
In 2009/10 things were different. The forecast for 2010, predicting a warm year, was made to coincide with the Copenhagen Conference. At the time the forecast was made, far from not having the December data, the UK Met. Office did not even have the November data.
Maybe I am biased, but to me this is the UK Met. Office being completely unscientific. The timing of the 2010 forecast was made to have maximum impact on Copenhagen, and seems to have been done for completely political, not scientific, reasons.
If the BBC want value for money and accuracy then why do they need to go to New Zealand to get it? Maybe it iz becoz they iz likewize AGW biazed?
As a TV licence payer I demand that WeatherAction and Piers Corbyn are given the contract because the accuracy of their predictions makes them better value for money than the Met Office by far. Oh wait, I forgot about the AGW biasssssss
“vjones (04:05:12) :
Anything linked with “the state” is, in my experience, not efficient.”
I totally agree. In my experience, and I won’t mention organisations in this post (My name is posted freely here, but in this post I will limit the names of the Orgs) however, I worked for a couple of “crown” entities that were just comical, I really mean comical.
With serious doubts being raised about the activities of the CRU, post climategate, along with the UK Met Office in light of their persistent poor record in forecasting, together with the Hockey Team’s apparent manipulation of climate data, one simply wonders when these various groups realised their doom laden prophecies were wrong. It looks as if it was a long time ago. It looks as though there was a concerted effort to fiddle the data over a considerable period leading to questions of motive. Can it be only to protect the funding these organisations and individuals receive?
As failed prophets throughout history have found: if your prophecies fail to materialise, you’re in deep trouble. It appears that the Warm Front discovered years ago that the globe just wasn’t going to cooperate as far as their predictions were concerned so they attempted to pull off the most expensive scam ever. They told us it was warmer than it really was; they continued to warn us that temperatures would go on rising; they admonished us that it was our fault. All these are proving incorrect. Can anyone explain why anybody is still listening to them?
The ghost of Big Jim Cooley (00:29:46) :
The BBC’s Paul Hudson (weatherman) wades in http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1243846/Met-Office-accused-warm-bias-BBC-weatherman.html
Paul Hudson’s name keeps coming up. Where does he fit in to the time line?
“I was forwarded the chain of e-mails on the 12th October……”
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/paulhudson/2009/11/climategate-cru-hacked-into-an.shtml
Stefan (02:06:49)
Was the programme you referred to this ?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00pv1c3
– about chaos theory. Being a non- scientist, I found it interesting, (inspite of it coming from the BBC).
It put some context to weather/climate being described as a chaotic system.
The troubles of the MET office are common to a lot of the UK Govt institutions, after 12 years of one party in power they have ceased to be independent and are now in the pockets of NU Labour. Too many political appointments by a party more interested in managing the press than actually delivering on policy statements. A good clearout is in order but in the long term the replacements will also end in the same state unless replaced themselves. A good case for a Prime Minister only allowed 2 terms, both Tony Bliar and Margaret Thatcher had power go to their heads after the 8th year.
JohnG (04:29:05) :
As failed prophets throughout history have found: if your prophecies fail to materialise, you’re in deep trouble. It appears that the Warm Front discovered years ago that the globe just wasn’t going to cooperate as far as their predictions were concerned so they attempted to pull off the most expensive scam ever. They told us it was warmer than it really was; they continued to warn us that temperatures would go on rising; they admonished us that it was our fault. All these are proving incorrect. Can anyone explain why anybody is still listening to them?
I have recently been wondering who they are exactly. Who is capable of coordinating a global scam of this magnitude? And how is it possible that so many bright people could have been so completely taken in? This is a question that history, at some point, will demand an answer. Who is running the AGW political campaign?