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
@Roy says:
January 12, 2011 at 6:10 am
“Weather forecasting is not an exact science yet and it is possible that the rest of the winter might turn out very mild. However Corbyn was certainly right about December which was the coldest in Britain for a century.”
I was looking at higher solar wind speeds well into January, and a return of south westerlies giving temp`s around normals, which is where we are at currently this month; http://hadobs.metoffice.com/hadcet/cet_info_mean.html
Feb should be well below normals, in the second half particularly.