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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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-17907418
Latest on this from the BBC. Caroline Spelman is a government minister who specialises in talking complete rubbish all the time.
AJB says: May 1, 2012 at 5:30 pm
Thanks for the links – the GMB one is especially revealing.
I recall back in the 80s when the “Iron Lady” privatised the water boards, reading that one of their first actions was to reduce staff by about 25%. The first to go were the”out all day” workers who maintained run-off channels on hillsides, meaning that as these silted up and became overgrown water ran off the surface onto grazing and other farmland, and into streams and rivers rather than the reservoirs.
Perhaps the “Iron Lady” was afraid of rust tarnishing her image?
A wonderful book which I found recently is ‘The Weather of Britain’ by the late Robin Stirling (ISBN 1-900357-06-2). There’s plenty of fascinating data and analysis using records going back to the 1800s and earlier, and it’s a welcome relief from the AGW brigade’s relentless propaganda showing fraction of a degree increases and modelled data purporting to show the danger we’re all in from CO2.
Buy this book for a refreshing injection of reality!
Kozlowski says:
April 30, 2012 at 10:21 pm
At least they get the wrong answer faster with the newer computers. Thats good, right?
———————————
The problem is that it also allows them to produce more wrong answers in the same amount of time. 🙂
Seriously though, it is less widely recognised that modern computers allow the much faster production of scientific “data” without the trouble of spending time and money doing real experiments. And not just in Climatology.
More ‘in-silico’ results leads to more publications leads to more funding leads to more students cranking out more results…. the virtuous cycle that can leave experimentalists trailing behind.
html test waterbank.com link
[Moderator’s Note: We have a test page here for this sort of stuff. Please use it. -REP]
– The environment minister was just on the radio : “If we get a 3rd dry winter in a row then there could be standpipes in the street next summer” … Do I have to deconstruct why a preoccupaion with possible, but unlikely catastrophe far in the future is daft ?
– Also on today’s radio : “one driver has died in the floods”. In Goole a local potato farmer said “this flooding has cost me £60,000”
So “Why is she talking about next summer ? We could possibly get another dry winter, but then we could also get a wet summer (as usual, & summer rainfall is higher than winter normally anyway), This is the UK, it almost certainly rain enough to sustain normal life even if there are occasional “droughts” where it doesn’t rain for 6-7 weeks. The only issue is bad water management. Odds on when droughts break it will turn out authorities will have been overcautious & that there are many months of water in the reserves.
– SOME NOTES : The aquifer argument waterbank.com “Ground water contributes to some 30% of the overall supply of fresh water for public supply in England and Wales another said 35% – ” The groundwater resource is replenished by rainfall, primarily in the winter months when the amount of water lost from the surface of the ground as a result of evaporation and uptake by plants is at a minimum. Groundwater droughts are therefore caused by relatively dry winters rather than by dry summers, although the latter do, of course, contribute.”
“The groundwater level under London is rising rapidly””The UK Groundwater Forum, in partnership with the NERC Water Security Knowledge Exchange Programme (WSKEP) is holding its annual conference on drought issues and will be followed by a WSKEP workshop on ‘Improving drought prediction, communication and impact assessment’. The conference and workshop will be held on 13-14th June at British Geological Survey, conference centre, Nottinghamshire”
– As ever the speakers are in COMPLEXITY DENIAL : “this rain makes no difference to the drought..past 2 years etc. ”
No, 30% of supply comes from groudwater, the other 70% is pretty much OK.
The Groundwater supply is the issue not the the other 70%
– and 1. Even for the groundwater : The fact that the “resource is replenished by rainfall, primarily in the winter months” doesn’t mean we can say trhe April rains make no difference; it is reasonable to expect that a lot of that excessive April rain will overtime go into the groundwater.
2. Presumably we don’t have to take 30% from groudwater anyway. We could probably cut it to 20% & take another 10% from surface water.
– The River Pang Trick – I noticed the authorities were taking reportewrs to the River Pang “look this river is still dry”
I checked the River Pang is not a normal river. Most say 80-99% of rivers get their water from rainwater flowing off the land, the River Pang is different it is a The spring-fed chalk stream : it gets it’s water from the watertable spreading up through chalk and when I check the info check the info for it all those special conditions the media churn-out apply to it. It’s says stuff like “The River Pang is a chalk stream that starts north of the village, the exact starting … are mainly replenished by rain that falls during the Autumn and early Winter”
.. BTW Yes it’s easy to show the River Pang dry as it’s a very shallow river it’s only 20cm deep normally & 35cm is considered a flood enviroments Agencies own graphs for River Pang. It sometimes dries up randomly in normal years anyway.
The Met Office cannot forecast its way out of a paper bag even with their supercomputer.
Piers Corbin at WeatherAction with his laptop runs circles around these blokes forecasting 3 months in advance with 85% accuracy.
Drought/flood.
Good forecast.
Colour me surprised.
– Last night on The BBC Inside Out : a set of regional Drought Special progs
– The BBCNews-eco-activists must have been crying when in the middle of them making their DROUGHT PORN special we got the highest April rainfall ever (in our area)
– Thank God our local weather forecaster Paul Hudson ended the prog with “So many people ask me after this 18 month to 2 year dry spell ‘Is climate change to blame?’ Well since it predicts wetter winters and drier summers I suspect that it’s highly unlikely”
…… he then went onto say they’ll be more heavy rain next week.
– our shed roof has a 1200L water butt which I have emptied 3 times this year (twice this month), I don’t think I am worried about conserving water.
There’s an old computer saying “Garbage In, Garbage Out” meaning that if the information that the computer gets is garbage then likely the conclusions are going to be garbage as well. And if there one thing that socialists produce in mass quantities it’s garbage.
SNIP. You are not Michael Mann and the e-mail address you submitted is false. If you want to comment here follow site policy or get lost. -REP
[SNIP: You can post this after you’ve learned some manners and learn to obey site policy. -REP]
The fact that the “resource is replenished by rainfall, primarily in the winter months”
But that is based on the simple fact that the rainfall is usually primarily in the winter months and the water evaporates and in used in the summer months. Rainfall in the summer months falls on hard baked dry ground and runs off into rivers and the sea. Again this is not true in the current early summer rainfall as the localised flooding was relatively minimal compared to to other years in spite of some really high levels of rainfall.
Interestingly this is what was predicted by some of those in the acid rain campaign group of the late fifties. They claimed that over cleaning the air would return to the more natural conditions of less frequent and heavy rainfall as there would not be the artificial particulate base for cloud formation we think of as natural because it has been the state for some generations.
There seems to be too much emphasis on the theoretical and not enough on getting out at the real world for a reality check.
As for the water shortage I wonder if the six projects where the building was on drained flood plains each of which drained into the rivers instead of storing a ten KM by one KM area half a metre deep might just have a teeny bit to do with it. About ten trillion litres or so might just help a little.