Piers Corbyn, while seemingly a bit eccentric, has the distinction of being the only man to have this headline:
The man who repeatedly beats the Met Office at its own game
Armed only with a laptop, huge quantities of publicly available data and a first-class degree in astrophysics, he gets it right again and again.
Well, now he has competition from New Zealand with yet again another guy armed with a laptop and public data, as Jo Nova reports below:
Laptop beats Met Supercomputer: SOI index (at record high) scores a win.
Back on August 6, 2010, when the UK BOM was predicting a warm winter, and every Met Agency in the West was already declaring that 2010 would be the hottest year ever, Bryan Leyland predicted (on a global scale) that before the end of the year, there would be significant cooling. As you can see from the chart, this is exactly what happened.
The UK Met Office has a gigantic supercomputer, 1,500 staff and a £170m-a-year budget, but a retired engineer in New Zealand armed only with Excel and access to the internet and with the McLean is et al 2009 paper, was able to get it right.
Parking the SOI index (the blue line) 7 months into the future suggests things may get cooler still as the temperature (red line) often follows the trend. (Click for a larger image.) Note, the SOI is shifted 7 months forwards in time, and the scale is inverted.
Before anyone scoffs that the El Nino’s are usually followed by cooling, and the SOI indicator is well known, ponder that the well fed agencies of man-made-climate-fame weren’t telling the public that a big-chill was on the way and they ought to stock up on salt and red diesel. (And maybe take their own deicing fluid to the airport.*)
Read it all here
Alex the skeptic says:
January 12, 2011 at 5:47 am
orkneygal says:
January 12, 2011 at 3:21 am
Is this the same British weather office that General Eisenhauer relied upon to send the Soldiers of Democracy across the Channel into Normandy to begin the liberation of Europe?
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orkneygal, good one. Now, all we need is to reverse the process, send in the soldiers of democracy back to the UK, to the Met Office to be exact, and liberate us from the cli-myth shamans.
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I was thinking we could send in Pamela and her ‘christmas present’…
Which is it his laptop’s brand? 🙂
While fun, this post is essentially meaningless. If I asked 50 people what tomorrows temperature would be a percentage of them would get it right. Does that mean they are better than the weather service at forecasting. No! Out of all the people out there trying to beat the met office, a percentage will be more accurate even if they are all just guessing. Does that mean they are better forecasters? No, again.Until someone has a long term recored and an understandable methodology, getting 1, two or three winter forecasts right doesn’t tell us much.
And I am a strong skeptic but I know a bit of propability.
But I can’t spell it. “probability” 🙂
jknapp,
You are correct – for any one year. But for every consecutive year the MET Office gets it wrong, while PC gets it right, the probability increases that the former is due to incompetence and the latter has figured out something that others haven’t.
Well, Piers is way wrong with his Jan forecast for the UK (so far). He predicted (with the usual hyperbole) bitter cold and in fact it’s very mild and looks like it will continue that way for some time.
I can’t my head round his method (something to do with the moon?), but whatever it is, it ain’t working this month.
WyattH says:
January 12, 2011 at 7:42 am
Sorry, but I can’t handle the term “SOI index”. That’s redundant. Reminds of when an actor in the part of a scientist says “RPMs”. Drives me nuts.
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Is it because ArsePeeEmm sounds rude? 😉
Completely agree with you, by the way.
Smokey says:
January 12, 2011 at 12:21 pm
and the latter has figured out something that others haven’t.…..
Buying the right PC 🙂
Sam Hall says:
January 12, 2011 at 9:48 am
orkneygal says:
January 12, 2011 at 3:21 am
Is this the same British weather office that General Eisenhauer relied upon to send the Soldiers of Democracy across the Channel into Normandy to begin the liberation of Europe?
He had three weather groups, the MET, the US Army Air Corps and the Navy, reporting to Group Captain J.M. Stagg who briefed him.
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Yep and none of them used a computer or computer model with built-in CO2 warming.
@Roy, With expectations on that level, this is a job for Superman!
I cannot afford his services but I find this method based on solar influence related to past cycles and events infinitely more interesting than those based on models of the effects of greenhouse gasses and the inbuilt assumption that the earth is warming (whatever the euphemism the warmists may concoct – climate change, disruption, etc – it always means global warming, doesn’t it?).
Having said that, nobody should expect miracles and WA’s 85% claimed success rate also implies at least a 15% failure rate or not seeing all some events coming. I for one have no problem with that; what interests me is the approach.
But I am interested to know what precise services you ordered from WA and whether you were satisfied with them. — If not, why not?
Hey, I know where the UK can cut a quick £170m-a-year from their budget!
I’ll only charge them a 1% finders fee for the advice!
People see ‘chaos theory’ and don’t recognise that it is not just a word – but one of the three great ideas of 20th Century physics along with relativity and quantum mechanics. I don’t know about God not playing dice – but abrupt and nonlinear change is simply maths.
Yarmy says:
January 12, 2011 at 12:28 pm
Well, Piers is way wrong with his Jan forecast for the UK (so far). He predicted (with the usual hyperbole) bitter cold and in fact it’s very mild and looks like it will continue that way for some time.
I can’t my head round his method (something to do with the moon?), but whatever it is, it ain’t working this month.
IIRC Piers said that it would be very cold at the end of the month, and that’s more than 2 weeks away from now. And it may have been mild where you are, but where I am in Scotland we still have snow from November (which has been covered by numerous December and January falls). January has not been so cold as December (when the average anomaly was -6C) but it has still been below average.
This Donegal guy can also get it right and he doesn’t even have a laptop:
http://www.independent.ie/national-news/postman-delivers-his-chilling-verdict-icy-blast-to-last-for-weeks-or-months-2442957.html
lapogus says:
January 12, 2011 at 2:10 pm
Yarmy says:
January 12, 2011 at 12:28 pm
Well, Piers is way wrong with his Jan forecast for the UK (so far). He predicted (with the usual hyperbole) bitter cold and in fact it’s very mild and looks like it will continue that way for some time.
I can’t my head round his method (something to do with the moon?), but whatever it is, it ain’t working this month.
IIRC Piers said that it would be very cold at the end of the month, and that’s more than 2 weeks away from now
I saw his forecast on video. He said there would be respits from the cold in small areas at times. Yarmy is likely in one of those areas. Corbyn doesn’t get 100% accuracy. But 81 to 85% is higher than anyone I’ve heard of. If we kept track of the nightly weather would we end up with 85%?
Robert Ellison says:
January 12, 2011 at 2:00 am
To be fair the Met Office press release said that 2010 would be the warmest if there was no volcano or large La Nina.
We can fix this perception of yours given that the SOI and ENSO lead climate by 7 months. So the SOI was already well in decline when they made their very wrong predictions.
So is the problem that they don’t trust the SOI/ENSO correlation or that they don’t trust the ENSO/Climate correlation? Either way, they have the same access to the same data that Leyland and Corbyn did and they still got it wrong.
No excuses.
I don’t know where the 85% comes from. What does it mean? Who is measuring? The statements are too vague. “Some places will get a respite”. Which places? What’s a respite: a 5C daily high or a 10C daily high? I’m sorry, but it’s snake oil to me.
RetiredDave has not long posted on Bishop Hill that Paul Hudson has put up a graphic which supports their assertion that they did predict a colder than average winter:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/paulhudson/2011/01/the-met-office-winter-forecast.shtml
Personally I think there’s a political war going on in the MO between the meteorologists and the climate modelling warmists.
All of the forecasts that I have made for the past three years are still viewable on my web site, as well as the next three years of daily forecast for the contiguous USA. I receive no monies from my efforts, and I personally fork over the money for all operating costs of my forecast endeavors.
I am now close to the end of the Beta stage of development of my ideas, and will be further extending the processes I use in the next year to develop an even better product, with international coverage outside the USA.
Got an email from Eric Floehr from Forecast watch asking for the raw data to process to evaluate my over all forecast accuracy.
“” I would love to get Aerology forecasts into ForecastWatch and learn more about your process.””
Sent him the data on a flash drive, he will let me know when he has the past 6 months processed, and I will post the news of it here post haste.
Pattern recognition is the skill that gets the job done! Ike had an independent forecaster producing the “D day” forecast, Irving Krick who like Piers based his forecasts on repeating patterns in the weather due to Lunar and solar magnetic strength impulses.
The process I use is based on a repeating pattern of Lunar and solar magnetic interactions with the orbital periods of the inner planets to generate an analog set of three cycles like this one to combine to get the map results. Piers uses several other cycles with a look back time of about 132 years, I suspect 130.2, 132, and 133 years to get the past patterns of solar activity in relation to past weather data then extrapolates the differences from then to now to get the finished product.
Like Irving Krick’s work, the technique takes skill and a natural talent for pattern recognition. Along with a greater detailed understanding on how the interaction between the solar wind and the orbital periods of the solar system are inter related, further study into these relationships is where the answers will be coming from.
Richard Holle
By the way I do not have a laptop;( what I am using is a HPmodel a6750t with, Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU E7500 @ur momisugly 2.93GHz 2.93GHz
with 6.00GB of ram, running a 64-bit Operating System MS Vista.
Cost about $2,000.00 +SQL Server software, and a couple of graphing packages.
orkneygal says:
January 12, 2011 at 3:21 am
“Is this the same British weather office that General Eisenhauer relied upon to send the Soldiers of Democracy across the Channel into Normandy to begin the liberation of Europe?”
No! Back then they had real people, both on land and at sea, supplying accurate and unadulterated pressure and temperature readings!
Here’s an idea, maybe Piers Corbyn gets it right, because he’s using sound science rather than wishful thinking and a bogus theory!
You don’t even need a laptop to beat the Met Office at their game. Here’s a small model that weighs less than an ounce and fits in a film can. I carry it with me all the time in case I need a quick forecast. One time I even correctly “predicted” that 1934 was the USA’s warmest year using this model. A version of the model is located here:
http://i.ehow.com/images/a06/85/es/play-bunko-800X800.jpg
Wrong and wrong.
Chaos isn’t in the mind of the beholder. There is a very precise mathematical definition of when a dynamical system is chaotic and that definition (rather than some vague everyday sense of the word) is what is being referred to here.
It was Einstein who very famously said “God doesn’t play dice” when referring to quantum mechanics (not chaos). However he was very famously wrong when he said it. You are quoting one of his most memorable mistakes.
Lots of instances in that short graph where temperatures and the SOI move in opposite directions…