UPDATE: Forecast humor on steroids, here
You can’t make up FAIL like this. First this story in the BBC Today:
Now let’s have a look at the official Met Office forecast for April, issued on March 23rd, 2012:
Met Office 3-month Outlook
Period: April – June 2012 Issue date: 23.03.12
SUMMARY – PRECIPITATION:
The forecast for average UK rainfall slightly favours drier than average conditions for April-May-June as a whole, and also slightly favours April being the driest of the 3 months. With this forecast, the water resources situation in southern, eastern and central England is likely to deteriorate further during the April-May-June period. The probability that UK precipitation for April-May-June will fall into the driest of our five categories is 20-25% whilst the probability that it will fall into the wettest of our five categories is 10-15% (the 197-2000 climatological probability for each of these categories is 20%).
CONTEXT:
As a legacy of dry weather over many months water resources in much
of southern, eastern and central England remain at very low levels.
Winter rainfall in these areas has typically been about 70% of average,
whilst observations and current forecasts suggest that the final totals for
March will be below average here too. The Environment Agency advises
that, given the current state of soils and groundwater levels in these
areas, drought impacts in the coming months are virtually inevitable.
Read the entire forecast here: http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/media/pdf/p/i/A3-layout-precip-AMJ.pdf
Saved copy here: Met_Office_A3-layout-precip-AMJ
Obviously, the power sucking supercomputer they recently put online needs to be bigger.
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.
GIGO me thinks. This isn’t the first time this has happened:
Met Office admits they botched snow warning
And then there’s the BBQ summer fiasco, which prompted replacement of the seasonal forecasts with the shorter term one you see above:
Met Office ends season forecasts – no more “BBQ summers”
Maybe they should stick to DART (Digital Advanced Reckoning Technology) which can do the job of making forecasts equally well, using less power, less space, and less money: 
h/t to Charles the Moderator and Adrian Kerton over at CA in comments.
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The MET office used to be a respected organisation when it was based at Bracknell. Then it moved to Exeter, was given a massive budget, super computers and a political agenda. It has been downhill ever since.
John has marvelous technology at hand to help the MET.
http://tinyurl.com/6m5jq8s
Every time i try to point out the general failure of weather prediction in my house, i am met with a general acceptance that it is perfectly fine for them to be completely wrong. Of course, then i try to point out that the only career close to the accepted level of failure displayed by meteorology/climatology is politics which is then met with the reasoning that that is ok because we vote for them. …….and people wonder why i have little hair left.
Although it doesn’t alter the drought conditions it should be pointed out that …
The total amount of water leaked by water firms in England and Wales – 1,226billion litres – would fill Lake Windermere, England’s largest lake, four times a year.
Thames Water being the biggest culprit
richardscourtney @ur momisugly 2.54am:
Quite so.
Piers has been kicking up a bit of a storm too …
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/the-weatherman-caught-in-a-media-storm-7665925.html
From the BBC online article:-
“Tewkesbury, which suffered severe flooding five years ago, is among the areas affected by heavy rain, with flood alerts in place for every river in Somerset.”
I can only assume that the extract above is the usual slip-shod slap-dash reporting that substitutes for journalism these days. For the benefit of my colonial cousins, Tewkesbury is in fact a beautiful historic town in the county of Gloucestershire, (pronounced Glostersheer), geographically speaking, from a UK viewpoint, it is nowhere near the county of Somerset, unlike the implication in the paragraph! An excellent example of ratchet reporting of a non-event of AGW!
“The figures up to April 29 show the amount of rain which has fallen is almost double the long term average for April of 69.6mm, in records dating back to 1910.”
So what evidence do they have that this hasn’t happened before then? 102 years / 4500, 000,000
x 100/1 = calculator can’t reproduce enough decimal places but it is 2.2666 x 10^6% of the Earth’s existance! Wow, I’m really losing sleep over this one, not!
I think they are using a dart board but then think how well some darters can throw after a pint or two
@Nick Stokes. Clearly you didn’t read my comment-
Not the “wrong type of rain”, but the “wrong type of ground.
Or to put it another way “rotten” rain/ground, just like “rotten” ice.
What gets me about Auntie Beeb’s (BBC) reporting of this flood drought is that they show footage of the Somerset Flats (that’s flood plain) flooded. Why are people surprised when flood plains flood?
We have a Met Office who cannot accuratelyforecast the weather more than 24 hours in advance. According to the excellent Sunday Telegraph column written by Christopher Booker, the reason the Met Office get it wrong is because they have factored AGW into the computers programming. The assumption that the country is a few tenths of a degree warmer than it actually is, is bound to make forecasting incorrect
I am writing this while on holiday in the Costa del Sol, today the sun is shining, yesterday we had rain, hail and thunderstorms all accurately predicted by Accuweather. In Summer here, the swimming pools are full, there are irrigated communal areas with plants and grass, this is where rain is a rarity from June to October.
Hysteria seems to be the main driving factor in what once was our great country. Whether it is floods, drought, AGW, smoking, alcohol, sunbathing, health and safety, we are subjected to continual diatribes from so called “experts” who do not have a clue what they are talking about. As a nation we are costantly bombarded with doom laden prophecies that have no bearing on reality.
If an individual told me that floods were forecast and we were in the middle of a drought and having an unwashed car was a sign of pride, I would think they should be referred for a psychiatric examination, but the population believe this drivel because an “expert” told them that it is so.
The UK has gone mad!
david brown (April 30, 2012 at 11:37 pm): “A warmer climate, with its increased climate variability, will increase the risk of both floods and droughts (Wetherald and Manabe, 2002 ]”
I read your reference. It shows that in England there will be more precip in DJF and less in MAM, the opposite of this year. Also figure 4 shows a similar width of model ensemble results as the average precipitation increases which implies a decline in variability, not an increase.
Alan the Brit says:
May 1, 2012 at 3:47 am
Quite right.
I can assure you that my Tewkesbury colleagues are exasperated at the media coverage of the flooding. It’s actually not that bad for Tewkesbury at the moment. The town was built on the confluence of the rivers Avon and Severn and so it floods almost every year.
It’s only considered bad if the abbey floods (which was built on higher ground centuries ago) or if it’s your house that leaks.
in australia the MET has computers but they don’t no how to use them they instead look out the window and still get it wrong , they are all told what the long range forcast will be by the global warmest gooses
It is even worse. The Outlook was issued as late as 23rd March.
They also had this to say about temperatures.
For April the forecast also favours temperatures being warmer than the 1971-2000 reference period. …
Fellow Brits will confirm that it has been flippin cold in April.
http://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2012/04/20/met-office-fail-again/
Well if you build on flood plains and close down reservoirs, what do you expect …
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/drought/9236909/Thames-Water-accused-of-mismanagement-by-closing-two-dozen-reservoirs.html
I have a theory regarding that supercomputer and why it keeps getting things so wrong…
First off, the degree of accuracy in the short term is related mostly to the ‘significance’ of what you are measuring. Basically number crunching fewer yet more significant measurements has a higher degree of inherent accuracy than processing many insignificant measurements; as they fundamentally hold less individual information value wrt reality.
Now there is only going to be a finite amount of significant measurements yet an infinite number of insignificant measurements for any given system being monitored…
The practical end result of this is that there is a point beyond which throwing more processing power at modeling a system defined with more now insignificant measurements actually results In a progressive degrading in the value of the whole modeling exercise…
So using bigger and bigger computers with more and more insignificant measurements ends up with garbage always as the output. The ‘noise’ in the system has won…
As one lark said of the recent widespread flooding in Oz after the usual doom and gloom suspects had been banging on about the long drought- I’m having a wee bit of trouble clearing away all this water so I can see the drought underneath.
http://climategatestuff.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/rain.png
Not enough rainfall – twaddle!
Where but in the UK – where we have the Met Office and its £60m computer ‘Deep Black’ (should actually called ‘Deep Sh*t’) – could you get hosepipe bans and flood alerts in the same areas..?
And these guys reckon they can predict the climate eighty-odd years hence..?
A bunch of Hanrahans the lot of them-http://www.middlemiss.org/lit/authors/obrienj/poetry/hanrahan.html
“Now let’s have a look at the official Met Office forecast for April, issued on March 12th, 2012:
Met Office 3-month Outlook
Period: April – June 2012 Issue date: 23.03.12”
Anthony: that’s not March 12, 2012, it’s March 23 2012, which makes it MUCH worse – a little over a week before April started!
I fully expect the government to mandate that all homeowners to do their bit and store the excess rain in their basements by having their downspouts flow into their houses and sealing all windows and doors in case water levels reach the main floor
In fairness to the MetOffice, their prediction probably turned out correct in their computer model land.
The rooks got it right-built this years nest lower down in the trees! Past years have been right in the tops.