By Paul Homewood
We’ve been inundated this month by Storms Ciara and Dennis, but did our glorious Met Office see it coming?
They will quite rightly claim that their seven day forecasts have been broadly accurate, something that just about every weather forecaster in the world could boast.
But once a month, they publish their Contingency Planner for the next three months. This is the one issued on Jan 24th for precipitation:
Of course, it is for 3-months, so we await what comes in March and April. Nevertheless, until recently they included a paragraph for 1-month ahead, which ought to be the most valuable and relevant for users of the planners. It appears they have dropped this because it was so often wrong.
But we can get a glimpse of their projections from the chart below:
The range of 1-month model projections is so wide as to be worse than useless, everything from record wet to record dry! [The purple scatter column on the right]
Nevertheless, if you exclude the outliers, you get a range of projections around the average for recent years. Certainly nothing like the rain which has already arrived, with more to come.
We hear that the Met Office is to get another bright, shiny new computer, at a cost to taxpayers of £1.2bn. Perhaps they should first explain why they cannot even get forecasts right a month ahead, before wasting more taxpayer money.
Booker, of course, had it all worked out years ago, when the Met Office promised its super duper new £97m computer would not only forecast short term weather, but also the climate 100 years hence:
Five years after we paid £33 million to buy the Met Office a new computer, we are now to pay £97 million to give them a “world-leading super-computer” – described by its chairman as “our integrated weather and climate model, known as the Met Office Unified Model”. That’s because it will not only “produce the most accurate short-term forecasts that are scientifically possible”, but can also predict how the Earth’s climate will change over the next 100 years.
It’s the same old story now – except for the bill!
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February 21, 2020 at 08:50AM
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