Met Office Fail Again
By Paul Homewood
For us lucky souls living in the UK, April has been a pretty miserable month, cold, wet and windy. Next week does not seem much better either.
So how did the lads down at the Met Office fare with their forecast for the month. Silly question, I suppose.
On 26th March they issued their 3 month outlook (available here). They had this to say about 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.
Well I suppose anybody can make a mistake and, after all, who could have predicted that these cloud things might drop a bit of rain or two. But surely, you ask, they must have at least forecast temperatures correctly?
For April the forecast also favours temperatures being warmer than the 1971-2000 reference period. …….The probability that mean UK temperature for April-May-June will fall into the coldest of our five categories is less than 5%, whilst the probability that it will fall into the warmest of our five categories is 55-60% (the 1971-2000 climatological probability for each of these categories is 20%).
Oh dear! A warmer than average May and June as well. I guess I might as well put the BBQ back in the garage.
Comments are closed.
NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
O dear. But I thought the Met Office had given up giving seasonal forecasts?
They call them projections now. I did a projection on the Grand National- i bet my horse would come in somewhere between first and last – it came 37th, so I won £100.
Geez! Can I have an intro to your bookie? I betcha I can make bets like that with great accuracy!
They never issued such a forecast. The previous comment is correct, the met office does not issue a 3 month forecast
Your link is to a page on their website about contingency planning services.
Bob,
They now call it “A Three Month Outlook”. If you scroll down you will see the full report I have quoted from.
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/publicsector/contingency-planners
This just confirms their models have a warm bias. They gave odds of 20-to-1 against what has tuned out to be the coldest and most miserably cold April I can remember? I wouldn’t buy any more longer-term forecasts from the warmist Met, any more than I’d buy a used computer model from them.
“Slightly-used weather model for sale. One careful owner, 88 years of guarantee left . May need some tuning, and steering has a slight left bias. Warning: may endanger health and well-being or cause apoplexy if output taken too seriously or used to make projections.This product may not be right for you if you run a highways authority”.
… or an airport.
I got a notice from Anglian Water about how to conserve water during the drought last Monday….
It hasn’t stopped raining since!
The Met Office have announced that April was the wettest in the last century.
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/news/releases/archive/2011/wettest-april-on-record