The Met Office is to stop publishing seasonal forecasts, after it came in for criticism for failing to predict extreme weather.
It was berated for not foreseeing that the UK would suffer this cold winter or the last three wet summers in its seasonal forecasts.
The forecasts, four times a year, will be replaced by monthly predictions.
The Met Office said it decided to change its forecasting approach after carrying out customer research.
Explaining its decision, the Met Office released a statement which said: “By their nature, forecasts become less accurate the further out we look.
Tricky forecasts
“Although we can identify general patterns of weather, the science does not exist to allow an exact forecast beyond five days, or to absolutely promise a certain type of weather.
“As a result, ‘seasonal forecasts’ cannot be as precise as our short-term forecasts.”
It said the UK is one of the hardest places to provide forecasts for due to its “size and location”, making it “very hard to forecast much beyond a week”.
However, it said its short-term forecasts are “extremely accurate”.
The Met Office, based at Exeter in Devon, added that it would work towards developing the science of long range forecasting.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/uk_news/8551416.stm
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I see this more as an insurance policy than one of admission of lack of skill. Though they are right, beyond about a week, entropy and chaos kicks in. About all anyonecan forecast seasonally with accuracy is:
Spring will be warmer than winter
Summer will be warmer than spring
Fall will be cooler than summer
Winter will be colder than fall
We’ll so how well they do with short-term monthly forecasts that are “extremely accurate”.
h/t to WUWT reader Robert of Ottawa
Over at Small Dead Animals, Kate has mentioned the changed Met position, and then remarks about climate models, “accuracy increases with the distance from the target.”
When the bottom line start to sink into the red ink, you dump off the things that aren’t working for you. Public money has to be tight these days.
“We test these codes twice a day for robustness” – Julia Slingo.
I have just spent my working day testing software. And, as it happens, yesterday I was asked by the client for a list of all the tests I had performed on an earlier phase of the project. (I had already prepared most of it, of course).
Let’s see your list of tests that you do twice a day, Ms Slingo. Which parts of the code do you check on Tuesday mornings? Go on, give us a list.
mrjthomas (11:12:43) :
They do seem to be in trouble. Correct me if I am wrong but:
– Met Office confirmed that all of their forecasting uses the same models (daily, 5-day, monthly, annual, 100 year …)
– Met Office confirmed that their annual forecast has a warm bias of 0.05C (or 0.5C per decade, or 5C per century)
Game over for the Met Office, surely?
Boy, the oceans must really be boiling in their 1,000 year forecasts – 50C bias!
For some reason this thread has failed to attract the Trolls! Peaceful innit?
They were not criticized for “failing to predict extreme weather”.
They were criticized – and justifiably so! – for failing to predict extreme weather ACCURATELY. And I agree with their response: they need to stop it until they can do it with some minimum degree of accuracy – and absent the Warmist bias that appears to pervade their recent prognostications.
I think I found the answer:
http://motls.blogspot.com/2010/03/met-office-claims-to-have-found-agw.html
There’s apparently no study and/or data, someone suddenly just “knows”.
Funny that this came out the same day.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8550090.stm
Even funnier on the news before I left for work at 05:45 on the BBC this story was followed by the ferry being ice bound off the coast of Sweden. Irony is a wonderful thing
Rifleshooter (11:00:43) :
Perhaps you can be one of the next generation of HONEST climate scientists. 🙂
DaveE.
If the Met Office are cutting back on their functionality, does that mean the Government can cut back on their funding? Can’t expect to get paid the same for less work, can they?
I have been monitoring their monthly forecasts for years. At one time they stopped them because of poor accuracy and they are still rubbish. They have little skill what so ever beyond 3 days. Their 5 day forecasts which they claim are extremely good, are average. Sometimes quite useful other times totally useless. What has become clear to me is thay their models only work well when the atmosphere is stuck in a mode. Either stong westerlies accross the atlantic or strong blocking anticyclones to the north of europe. Otherwise, useless.
The best seasonal forecasts in recent times have come from accuweather/Joe B and more recently weatheraction piers C.
Rifleshooter (11:00:43) : “I still believe that the globe is warming, and I still think that some of the issue is man-made… but every thing I investigate has the smell of advocacy – not science – behind it”
A good scientist DOES NOT BELIEVE!! A good scientist gets the data, test it, looks for the assupmtions and caveats and decides how much accuracy there is in the answer, defines that accuracy in terms of the issues not understood and publishes ALL OF IT.
I hope that’s what you mentor is telling you. If he/she isn’t ditch them and find another. Belief is not part of the scientific method.
Breitbart has an interesting article about some who ARE making BIG EUROs off Poor Ol’Jones and the Bad Ol’Met Office’s incompetence. There is a silver lining in, and pot of glod at the end of, the ‘Mannmade’ Global Warming Rainbow.
EU’s ‘carbon fat cats’ get rich off trading scheme: study
Mar 5 12:05 PM US/Eastern
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=CNG.6a237570be4660439e371341ae8452d5.a41&show_article=1
Don B (12:10:10) :
Over at Small Dead Animals, Kate has mentioned the changed Met position, and then remarks about climate models, “accuracy increases with the distance from the target.”
Which is, of course, fundamentally correct. I predict the mean annual temperature of the earth will be .625 degrees warmer in 2110. Prove me wrong.
Corbyn’s SLAM (Solar Lunar Amplification Magnetic) process explains hadCRUSST (Hadley Centre / University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit Sea Surface Temperature):
http://www.sfu.ca/~plv/SLAMhadCRUSST.png
More here:
http://www.sfu.ca/~plv/VolcanoStratosphereSLAM.htm
WeatherAction’s Piers Corbyn’s UK March Weather Forecast:
Steve Goddard (10:27:58) :
“By 2080 the climate (of Dorset) may resemble that of present day Portugal.”
Great. Nice beaches in Dorset and it’s only a couple of hours on the train. Maybe we could even get home-grown vinho verde…
A few years back I was on a walking holiday in NW Scotland. According to the BBC weather forecast (provided by the MO) it was already raining, and I could expect non-stop rain, thick cloud, etc etc. Which was strange as at that moment the sun was beating down. It continued to do so all day… Fact: in Scotland, MO cannot forecast weather the same day.
The real reason for this change by the Met Office:
Shorter period for forecasts = greater accuracy = bigger bonuses.
Follow the money!
Actually, forecasting weather for the UK is comparatively easy. We lie on the end of The Gulf Stream, with a south westerly wind flow, hence the term for wet weather clothing for seamen “Souwesters”.
Since the advent of sattelite photo’s we have been able to see into the Atlantic Ocean, and seee the fronts moving towards us, and at 30 – 40 mph, it’s schoolboy arithmetic to be able to predict rain at lunchtime tomorrow.
There are two exceptions to this pattern.
In winter the jet stream can force a high pressure zone to move south from Iceland and sit right on top of us, which is what happened this year. It can sit on us for weeks, and during that time there is little wind, so windmills are useless, just when they are needed. When last year a windmill iced up and a blade snapped off, it was blamed on a UFO (I’m not making this up-and this is the land that produced Newton)
In summer, a high can move up from France, and similarly it can get trapped on us for weeks, 1976 comes to mind. Again the days are listless, so once again, windmills are useless for taking AC loads. Eventually the high breaks with very heavy thunder storms, and local flooding.
So when the MET say they are very good at forecasting, they should be, anyone can do it, the only times they get it wrong, are in the two descriptions above, which just shows that, looking out the window to the west, is as good a way as any to forecast UK weather.
Does anyone else see the disparity in Prof Slingo’s remarks?
“Professor Slingo: No, but that is not an error in the code;…”
and, in the same waffling, statement:
” So of course, a code that is hundreds of thousands of lines long undoubtedly has a coding error in it somewhere, and we hope that through this process we will discover it.”
Also, she has a habit of stating that there are ‘hundreds of thousands of lines (of code)”, sounding like an appeal for sympathy and understanding for the plight of climate ‘scientists’ who have to such a heavy burden of having to work with such large numbers of code lines.
Perhaps they should get rid of their supercomputers with terabytes of memory and give them 1970’s systems with limited memory that forces minimalised and accurate code.
and was one of the reasons the BBC was looking to an Australian company to provide its forecasts.
Actually, I think this is confused. There is a New Zealand company supplying its visuals. Not quite the same thing.
(BTW weather forcasting is easy for the Aussies. I can provide an accurate five-day forecast for Australia: hot – hot – hot – hot – hot. In Queensland and West Australia: very hot – very hot – very hot – very hot – very hot. Provided “hot” is defined relative to Hamilton, NZ.)
The Metoffice finally gives up seasonal forecasting in the face of a well-deserved kicking from nature. And the British will lament at their passing- a traditional source of immense amusement to all, the worse the prediction bombed the better it was.
The Metoffice’s only consolation remains the pieces of silver… oops, huge performance bonuses they got, despite failing miserably, for toadying up and at least trying hard to be on message.
At the risk of repeating myself from the bottom of another thread…
When the principals of an action are fully understood, the causes and outcomes of those actions become understandable and predictable.
The well known fact that weather models break down rapidly, shows that they DO NOT reflect the real drivers of global circulation. Building climate models based on some of the same principals, and just throwing in a hand full of other variables, DOES NOT HELP!
The understanding of what drives the weather, has been so politically regulated by the accepted experts maintaining a name for them selves, that the resultant “knowledge base” has become flawed by political opinions, defended as gospel, from way before climate science was born of energy/carbon agenda parents.
When the real truth is revealed about what is driving the global circulation that results in the weather, and how the trends in those cyclic patterns as they interact results in the variations in the climate, become known the resulting increase in forecasting skill using these methods will extend the current 3 day skill levels out past 10 years of daily forecasts.
The resultant sudden drop in the left over noise will leave little doubt about the influences of trace gasses, and man’s almost nonexistence of real level of influence on the scheme of things. I await the net results of these revelations with baited breath. If the alarmist are having problems maintaining false vintages now, just wait till the fog clears.
@ur momisugly Johnny Canuck (08:13:45) :
‘“The Mets new short term forecasts are EXTREMELY accurate”
Here is today’s forecast:
CLOUDY OTHERWISE CLEAR.’
As I type, I am still wiping the tears from my eyes at this. This could describe almost any day in the British year. Stunningly insightful and perceptive forecasting, although Old Moore’s Almanac manages just as well without a supersupercomputerer.
“Old Moore’s Almanac has been published for nearly 2½ centuries and does not reveal its methodology. ”
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ireland/2009/1119/1224259108486.html
“By their nature forecasts become less accurate the further out we look”. What a surprise! So how come they think we should believe their computer-modelled predictions for 50 and more years ahead?