By Paul Homewood

 

Readers will recall the claim in The Times in March that the Met Office’s Adam Scaife had alerted ministers about the “Beast from the East” nearly a month before it happened:

 

Britain’s freezing “Beast from the East” exploded into life thousands of miles away, in the tropical waters of the western Pacific — and ministers were warned that it was coming a month ago.

Adam Scaife, head of long-range forecasting at the Met Office, briefed the Cabinet Office four weeks ago, warning of a freeze. He was confident enough to stock up his home with extra supplies.

“I got extra oil, food and logs in, knowing this was coming,” he said last week.

His warning came after his team spotted a massive storm system moving east from the Indian to the Pacific oceans. Its effects rippled out, generating weather systems from the Pacific to the Arctic, warming the stratosphere, 20 miles above the North Pole, by 50C in two days.

The result was a zone of high pressure across the Atlantic so big that the jet stream, the wind that brings warm Atlantic weather to Britain, went into reverse, blanketing the UK in Siberian winds. “We recognised the pattern because we’d seen it before,” Scaife said. “The same thing caused the freezes of February 2009 and 2013.

https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2018/03/29/did-adam-scaife-lie-about-the-beast-from-the-east/

 

The Beast, of course, was the spell of exceptionally cold and snowy weather to hit pretty much the whole of Britain between around 26th Feb and 3rd March.

At the time, I was highly dubious about Scaife’s claim, because it did not tally with any forecasts from the Met Office around that time.

So I contacted the Cabinet Office to ask for a copy of Scaife’s supposed briefing. They replied that they had received no such briefing, as I reported on 29th March:

 

https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2018/03/29/did-adam-scaife-lie-about-the-beast-from-the-east/

 

Unwilling to let go of my bone, I FOI’d the Met Office for a copy of Scaife’s briefing. Here’s what they replied:

 

 

Their account tallies with the Cabinet Office’s, that the Scaife briefing never existed. The only forecast sent by the Met Office to the government was the 3-Month Outlook, on 26th January.

But as I pointed out on 18th March, that 3-Month Outlook most certainly did not forecast the Beast, or more significantly the SSW event which caused it, as Scaife tried to claim:

 

3-Month Outlook

What the Outlook did forecast, as it turned out quite correctly, was the cold spell that arrived in the first week of February. This was by no means an unusually cold event, and was already being widely forecast at the end of January anyway.

It certainly was not the major event, which Scaife claims led him to stock up on “oil, food and logs”. It was merely the sort of cold snap you expect several times every winter.

And, of course, it occurred three weeks before the Beast actually arrived.

To compare the two cold events, we can look at CET:

 

https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcet/cet_info_mean.html

 

The Beast sticks out like a sore thumb at the end of February, with daily temperatures close to record lows.

By contrast, temperatures during the cold spell in early February were within the normal range.

And, of course, if we look more closely at the 3-Month Outlook, it was the early-to mid Feb period that they forecast “an increased chance of colder than average temperatures”. This was hardly the apocalypse Scaife says he was warning about.

 

 

Still unconvinced? Then read on, because this was also what the Outlook also had to say:

 

 

In other words, the Outlook found little likelihood of the SSW. Furthermore it anticipated milder than usual conditions up to mid March. Given their forecast for colder weather in early February, this is pretty conclusive evidence that they thought late February and early March would be mild.

In short, Scaife’s claim that he forecast the Beast, and warned the government about it, is completely untrue, whether as a direct briefing, or as part of the 3-Month Outlook.

Maybe he was misreported in The Times, though the words he is quoted as saying cannot really be any clearer.

But if not, he has evidently been lying, in which case his position at the Met Office is now surely untenable.