WUWT readers may recall the story by the Daily Mail about the new supercomputer.
The Met Office has caused a storm of controversy after it was revealed their £30million supercomputer designed to predict climate change is one of Britain’s worst polluters.
The massive machine – the UK’s most powerful computer with a whopping 15 million megabytes of memory – was installed in the Met Office’s headquarters in Exeter, Devon.
With a total peak performance approaching 1 PetaFlop — equivalent to over 100,000 PCs and over 30 times more powerful than what is in place today. It is capable of 1,000 billion calculations every second to feed data to 400 scientists and uses 1.2 megawatts of energy to run – enough to power more than 1,000 homes.
With all that power, surely it must produce some quality digital reckoning.
Bishop Hill has located the “supposedly secret” winter forecast sent to the British government. The details of the forecast produced are nothing short of astounding.
When the kerfuffle over the Met Office’s winter forecast blew up, I wrote to the Quarmby team to see if they had actually received a copy of the Met Office’s cold-winter forecast, which was apparently sent to the Cabinet Office. It is alleged that the forecast should have provided sufficient warning to the government machine to ensure that everyone was ready for what happened in December.
Today, rather later than I expected, the Quarmby team have responded and have helpfully provided a copy of the forecast:
Met Office Initial Assessment of Risk for Winter 2010/11
This covers the months of November, December and January 2010/11, this will be updated monthly through the winter and so probabilities will change.
Temperature
3 in 10 chance of a mild start
3 in 10 chance of an average start
4 in 10 chance of a cold start
Precipitation
3 in 10 chance of a wet start
3 in 10 chance of an average start
4 in 10 chance of a dry start
Summary: There is an increased risk for a cold and wintry start to the winter season.
Looking further ahead beyond this assessment there are some indications of an increased risk of a mild end to the winter season.
Yes that seems clear, doesn’t it? Seeing the numbers produced, personally, I think this less expensive computer, using Digital Advanced Reckoning Technology (DART) can do the job of making odds equally well, using less power, less space, and less money:
I really love this one:
Looking further ahead beyond this assessment there are some indications of an increased risk of a mild end to the winter season.
I think its been done, something about “March coming in like a lion and out like a lamb” IIRC. But really, I never thought that a “mild end to winter” could be categorized as a “risk”.
But this forecast for the start of winter still doesn’t square with the Met Office map output.
Here’s the Met Office supercomputer enhanced model output forecast from October 2010: 
See the story about that controversy here and here
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GIGO
JPeden says:
January 21, 2011 at 12:39 pm
You’d think with all that computer power they’d be able to predict closer than one significant figure.
As a(n ex-)colonial (not Australian), the v.i. “to knacker” means to take a knife to the relevant parts. Appropriate.
We have it on deep background from a senior Pentagon official that the US of A’s Marc Kac supercomputer, downloaded from a recent extraterrestrial visitant to the body-shop of Area 51, has means of jiggling Earth’s magnetic pole to cause earthquakes in Haiti, volcanic eruptions in Iceland and the Philippines, plus “blocking highs” disrupting arctic jet-streams over Mother Russia.
Options traders in Chicago and on Wall Street wait only DARPA’s word to short every commodity in sight, crashing global economies prior to buying up the ENTIRE WORLD at fathomlessly deep discounts when industrial civilization craters. But little does Gordon Gecko know that carbon traders advised by Big Al Gore are on the case, advised since c. 1998 by ETs from Planet Klepto that Briffa, Hansen, Jones, Mann, Trenberth et al. will corner AGW markets in good time.
Who can prove us wrong?
In Nov.2005,on a visit to the U.K., I went with my brother’s Rotary Club to the Met. Office at Exeter.After a tour, escourted by a young lady, she asked if we had any questions.We had been shown their locked computer room,containing, I believe, 3 Cray computers.We had been told of all the data inputs, stations,balloons etc.
I asked what happened to the final weather forecast output from the computers.”Oh” said the girl” it’s put on the Chief Meteorologist desk so that he can see if it should go out.”
Amazing story – They should use that supercomputer to figure out how to solve the economic problems facing both the U.S and U.K.
I’m not a meteorologist, so I’m coming here (again) to ask about a model made by the “skepticalscience” group here, in which they claim to expose Lord Christopher Monckton’s usage of El Nino and temperature records and trends to explain the warming of the Earth: http://www.skepticalscience.com/news.php?n=520
Personally, it looks very suspicious to me. Firstly, what is this “all method temperature index” that is used, and what about the tables for the temperature index slope – They are using models based on 1998-2010 and 2001-2010 for the datasets, with the 2001-2010 showing less warming and they try and explain it away as “HADCRUTV3” didn’t have Arctic coverage to add into the total. Gistemp seems the worst, with 1.37C a century in the 1998 forecast and 0.73C from the 2001 forecast. Obviously I’m going to ask for some clarification on this article from all of you since I’m pretty sure this is a massively biased study.
And, in related news, is this what we can expect from this new “supercomputer”? Will it be programmed to use such minimal amounts of data that it will always predict on a warm slant?
“. . .A mild end of the winter”. My grandfather used to say “Wonderful spring is soon here.”
Obviously they cannot do seasonal forecasts with any sort of precision.
Therefore they do not understand how weather works beyond a time-frame of a few weeks.
However when “experts” pronounce on global warming, they do not annotate their predictions with any sort of disclaimer indicating their total lack of understanding. The certainty with which these predictions are delivered is appalling.
@ur momisugly Schadow says:
January 21, 2011 at 12:31 pm
As ‘Curiousgeorge’ mentioned, the Farmer’s Almanac is heavily relied upon for weather forecasting here in the Colonies.
We’re neighbors. N.E. MS ( near Columbus ) . 🙂 We tend to get the weather a day or so before y’all. Expecting another bit of snow in the next 10 days. Very cold today thru next week. Unusual for here, but not unprecedented. Go Tide! 🙂
Of course its not the supercomputer, its the software and the people who write it. The old case of garbage in – garbage out. If you include an AGW warming component in your input, then your forecasts are all going to be far warmer than reality. Seasonal forecasts are going to be hopeless, and even forecasts of the week ahead are going to be biased by this assumption. We saw in Nov-Dec that the Met office could not even reasonably forecast overnight minima and maxima for the next day, often overestimating temperatures by 5 -6 deg. The met office needs a complete overhaul, a purge of zealots, and a return to science.
@ur momisugly 1DandyTroll says:
January 21, 2011 at 12:58 pm
Guy in the pic pondering after calling tech support.
Hmm, how to turn it off and on again?
Ctrl, Alt, Del. According to MS anyway. 😉
GIGO applies to supercomputers too.
I would think the reason for the cold winter in the UK would be obvious.
That supercomputer is throwing off enough heat to generate a mini Hadley cell, leading to cold air being drawn in from the Arctic.
Turn it off and the UK will warm up again.
This will be a tremendous sacrifice. The programming staff will be highly upset at having to shut down their really kick-butt World of Warcraft realm.
Computer says no!
Have you seen this sketch from Little Britain?
Its very funny and perhaps relevant.
What’s the guy in the pic pondering:
Hmm, that’s funny, it’s still as big as it was in the 50’s.
Why not just simplify? There is an increased chance of weather this week with much more in the months that follow.
On the bright side, when not mispredicting the upcoming seasons, the MET supercomputer plays a mean game of chess!
The Met Office have not yet forecast their own demise – so there is a bloody good chance it won’t exist in a couple of years time!
You ask: “What sort of forecast does the Met Office Supercomputer make?”
Not a very good one. Or, to use the the technical terminology, shite!
It certainly makes one proud to be British.
A petaflop would be 1 quadrillion flops, or 1,000,000 billion calculations per second. 1,000 billion flops would be just a teraflop.
Looks like they may be having trouble counting, as well as forecasting!
…They left out a line of output….
3 in 10 chance of a mild start
3 in 10 chance of an average start
4 in 10 chance of a cold start
7 to 1 on Skeeball in the 5th
THEY’RE RUNNIN’ ODDS!!!!
..No wonder they can justify that much money on a computer….they’re gambling. Also reveals why they won’t let the code out. Would screw up the odds.
One assumes that ‘wintry’ has to do with precipitation (e.g. wintry showers) since ‘cold’ only has to do with temperature. Note the risk is given for cold AND wintry, i.e. higher than normal precipitation coupled with lower than normal temperatures.
Now, let’s look at the figures. On the face of them, there is a 60% chance that it will NOT have a cold start, and a 70% chance that it will NOT have a wet start. If these were independent variables then we’d end up with the probability of 88% that it will NOT start ‘cold and wintry’. That doesn’t exactly make me think that cold and wintry is very likely. We’re knocking on 90% here so that’s well above ‘likely’ and practically into ‘very likely’ territory in IPCC-speak that we shall NOT be seeing a ‘colder AND wintrier’ start than normal.
If we ascribe equal probabilities to all outcomes (i.e. assuming the Met Office did no better than throwing darts blindly at a dartboard, or used a random number generator to predict the weather) then we could give 33.33% probability to all three outcomes: cold, average, mild; and wet, average, dry. So the probability that the winter will NOT start ‘cold and wet’ if the individual outcomes are random and equal probability of turning up would be 88.89%.
Is someone trying to tell me that because 88% likelihood with some error bars (according to Met Office super-dooper prediction) is less than the theoretical 88.89% likelihood of the combination by throwing dice that the Met Office can say with a straight face “There is an increased risk for a cold and wintry start to the winter season”.
“Looking further ahead beyond this assessment there are some indications of an increased risk of a mild end to the winter season.” Increased risk compared to WHAT? Equal probabilities of all outcomes, what you’d get by throwing dice?
Something like this then:
4 in 10 chance of a mild end
3 in 10 chance of an average end
3 in 10 chance of a cold end
So with the start figures:
3 in 10 chance of a mild start
3 in 10 chance of an average start
4 in 10 chance of a cold start
we have 60% ‘chance’ that winter won’t start cold, but an increased ‘risk’ that it will start cold, and 60% ‘chance’ that winter won’t end mild, but an increased ‘risk’ that it will end mild.
So now we can play this any way we like, and pretend we’re better than throwing dice. If it starts cold the MO say “well, we said there was an increased risk [40%] of it starting cold”. If it doesn’t start cold the MO say “well, we said it was less likely than not [40%] to start cold”. If it starts average the MO say “well, we said it was less likely than not [40%] that it would start cold, and less likely than not [30%] that it would start mild”.
If it ends mild the MO say “well, we said there was an increased risk [40%] of it ending mild”. If it doesn’t end mild the MO say “well, we said that it was less likely than not [40%] to be ending mild”. And if it ends average the MO say “well, we said it was less likely than not [30%] that it would end cold, and less likely than not [40%] that it would end mild”.
Whatever happens you can con people into believing that you are ‘skillful’. Think astrology. Or the Delphic oracle.
“Looking further ahead beyond this assessment there are some indications of an increased risk of a mild end to the winter season.”
=========
So, indications are, there will be a spring !!
Thanks, for the risk assessment.
There is a discrepancy. On the one hand the forecast is said to cover November, December and January. On the other hand meteorological ‘winter’ is December, January and February. Clearly they cannot be saying that the ‘start’ and ‘end’ of the ‘winter season’ is on November 1/January 31, or December 1/February 28. So this little phrase ‘winter season’ is a complete con. The winter season isn’t fixed to dates: it starts when the weather turns cold and wintry, and it ends weather turns milder and spring. Notice that they say they put the date of the end of winter as ‘beyond this assessment’, i.e. after January 31. Every ‘winter season’ starts when it gets cold (that defines the start) and every winter season ends when it turns mild and spring arrives, whether early or late. Therefore, we can say of every ‘winter season’ “There is an increased risk for a cold and wintry start to the winter season, and the winter season will end after January 31 when there are some indications of an increased risk of a mild end”.
What a pathetic statement of the obvious.