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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but,but, but…it’s rotten rain, so it doesn’t really count
polistra says:
May 1, 2012 at 6:01 am
“The key, of course, is dams and engineering. Brits used to be the supreme masters of civil engineering, now they’ve completely forgotten.
Makes me thankful for FDR’s foresight, ”
Hydropower was just the panacea of that age after Tesla and Westinghouse managed to build the power plant at the Niagara falls. Technocracy, founded in 1932 by Scott and M. King Hubbert, was all about hydropower.
There was a guy in Germany at the same time, Soergel, promoting a dam at the Gibraltar straits to lower the Mediterranean sea level and extract 100 GW continuously. Google “Atlantropa”, (h/t Ulrich Elkmann).
From the 50ies on, nuclear power became the new panacea, and at the moment it’s wind and solar. Like Atlantropa, the big wind and solar visions will be forgotten as soon as the next panacea arrives, which will probably be LENR.
Even though the big utopian visions are never achieved, all of those technologies contribute something to today’s energy mix.
Prof. Julia Slingo, Director of the Centre for Global Atmospheric Modelling, said:
“At the Met Office we use the same model to make weather forecasts as we do to make our climate predictions, so every day we are testing the model and saying, ‘how well did we do with the weather forecast?’”
see:
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/corporate/pressoffice/in-depth/ask/julia-slingo.pdf
So no need to worry.
Is predicting the weather based on recent past weather forecasting or backcasting?
I played darts in the UK once and lost but the beer was good.
Wait, someone predicted a drought…for England????
Mike McMillan says:
May 1, 2012 at 1:07 am
“… and uses 1.2 megawatts of energy to run – enough to power more than 1,000 homes.”
That’s about a kilowatt per home.
Microwave oven -1200 watts, steam iron -1100 watts, space heater -1500 watts, oven -2500+ watts, range – 1500 to 3500 per burner, central air – 3500 watts, electric clothes dryer – 4000 watts.
Maybe homes in Romania.
And you run your microwave for what, about 5 minutes a day?
The average household in the US (which uses a lot more energy than the EU/UK per capita) uses about 24 kwh/day. That works out to be 1000w, which is the typical metric used when calculating the number of homes supported by a given generation capacity.
When will Meterologists and Climate Scientists admit that they can’t predict the weather nor the climate. Weather prediction even a couple days out is a crap shoot. Just this last weekend in my town they predicted mostly sunny, no precip. That was less than 24 hours out. On Saturday it ended up being mostly overcast and drizzly. Their Sunday forecast jusr 12 hours out was still mostly sunny and no precip. It was raining when I got up on Sunday morning, the sun only poked through for maybe an hour before the day turned completely overcast by afternoon. Complete fail.
After a month of heavy rain we still have the muppets from the met office saying the ground is too hard, it’s the wrong type of rain, blah, blah blah.
Either they got it wrong and misinformed the water companies, who would never have issued drought warnings if they knew that all this rain was coming, as it is making them look like money grabbing monopolies, or they are in collusion to drive water prices higher…
Which is it?
It’s a drought Jim, but not as we know it!
The “drought” that allegedly exists, is not comparable to the drought of 1976. Then, the UK suffered an entire summer under a heat wave and zero precipitation, and the result of the drought was everywhere to be seen – river beds cracked dry and brown, desicated vegetation. Wildlife suffered greately.
What we have today, is a technical water supply problem. As Richard Courtney pointed out earlier, there is insufficient water stocks to service the growing population and growing industrial needs. Nature, however, is doing just fine. Look around – the earth is water saturated and the vegetation is lush green.
Yet, I am disturbed by some of the propaganda emanating over the airwaves. On a BBC news program (where else!), a water expert proclaimed that the problem is, “people aren’t behaving in the way they should in a semi-arrid country”. Say what? England is a semi-arrid country? Well, colour me skeptical, but if the UK is semi-arrid, then where does Spain fit into the scale? Seems like someone is trying to rewrite the rule book.
So, she goes on about the need to change our behaviour. Something along the lines of all new buildings to incorporate mandatory water recycling such as bathwater into the toilet flush, and devices to recycle rain water from the roofs, and retrofited into existing buildings as well.
As soon as the met office announced a drought, we knew what would happen.Same thing last summer.Anything past three days out,
Actually I have three sites that I look at and if the wind is easterly the met does best for our area in Wiltshire while otherwise “The weather channel” or “Accuweather” do better. All three don’t do that badly up to five days.
From my window I can look over a field and see grass where yesterday there was over a foot of water in the same field. We actually while not having rain before this deluge, had a very long period where we had non stop fog and extremely heavy morning dew so the ground while not wet was just ready for the rain.
During my visit to Great Britain in June of 1997 it was termed the hottest, driest June in history. When I was there in the second half of the month it was the coldest, wettest June in history. And it was the same month. British weather is always volatile, and that has nothing to do with AGW.
To be fair, the Met actually meant the UK would suffer excess “dry rain” not the “wet rain” they actually got. Anyone could have made that little mistake [sarc]
Taxpayers in the UK should get a complete refund. Pure and simple.
Don’t count them out yet:
“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.”
If May and June are wetter than April, they will have gotten the second part right.
M Courtney says:
May 1, 2012 at 4:08 am
‘… 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)’
http://img.thesun.co.uk/multimedia/archive/01499/Tewkesbury-flood_5_1499679a.jpg
Those medieval folk were well aware of the flood plain they lived on and built their church accordingly and in the spirit of the Wise Virgins. But then, they didn’t have the Met Office to advise them, only the Almighty.
Ah now the BBC/Met office reckon the flooding is due to the ground being saturated, that happened quickly…
Well, as everyone has gone for the jugular, here goes with the Met Office’s general climate predictions. Some areas will have more rain, some areas will have less rain. Some areas will have more drought, some areas will have less drought. Some areas will be warmer, some areas will be cooler. You get the picture?
The problem here is not an unusual degree of incompetence, but an unusually hard job. Making predictions for the UK more than a couple of weeks in advance is pretty much impossible because there’s almost always a good chance of opposite types of weather depending on how much larger weather patterns develop. The quote below illustrates this perfectly:
“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%”
There’s almost no difference in the chances of it being dry or wet. As the timescales get shorter, the difference in probabilities becomes much larger, and the forecasts get more accurate. For what it’s worth, the onset of the rain was correctly predicted about a week in advance, and the subsequent break in the weather also by about the same margin.
The reason predicting the weather in the UK is so hard is that there are many well-defined patterns which bring easily predictable results, but until the weather actually starts to show one or another, it’s next to impossible to tell anything other than that a change is coming.
Your own institutionalized Gore Effect! How wonderful. :-/
“Always remember what the phrase ’50 percent chance of rain’ actually means – that 5 out of 10 forecasters have guessed that it will rain.”
The Met Office is just the gift that keeps giving. . .however, their timeless comedy stylings would be more appreciated if they weren’t so expensive to produce.
Kozlowski says:
April 30, 2012 at 10:21 pm
At least they get the wrong answer faster with the newer computers. Thats good, right?
———————————
Yeah, like, thanks a lot, Dude; I was in the middle of one of those exciting meetings with a project committee, and had to morph my guffaw into a cough while pretending to be reading a 30-page-plus proposal on my laptop.
Dave says:
May 1, 2012 at 9:44 am
The reason predicting the weather in the UK is so hard is that there are many well-defined patterns which bring easily predictable results, but until the weather actually starts to show one or another, it’s next to impossible to tell anything other than that a change is coming.
—————————–
Someone finally understands. That’s what I tell my wife too when she asks me to look out of the window and guess what the weather will be. I don’t make nearly as much as the Met, though.
This public photo on Facebook sums it all up, with all the irony it deserves.
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=381664591873033&set=a.372976906075135.81482.100000884877588&type=1&theater
Dave says:
May 1, 2012 at 9:44 am
‘The reason predicting the weather in the UK is so hard is that there are many well-defined patterns which bring easily predictable results, but until the weather actually starts to show one or another, it’s next to impossible to tell anything other than that a change is coming.’
And yet they can predict 50 years into the future …
You couldn’t make it up (though *they do).