By Paul Homewood
The latest long range outlook from the Met Office still contains the possibility of an extremely cold spell:
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/weather/forecast/gcqzwtdw7#?date=2023-02-23
Comments are closed.
 | liardetg on John Robson’s History of… |
 | John Hultquist on Transatlantic air fares to jum… |
| John Hultquist on John Robson’s History of… |
 | jeremy23846 on John Robson’s History of… |
 | It doesn't add up... on Why We Still Need Fossil Fuels… |
| It doesn't add up... on Why We Still Need Fossil Fuels… |
 | christreise on John Robson’s History of… |
 | brianohara1 on John Robson’s History of… |
 | HarryPassfield on Transatlantic air fares to jum… |
 | Gamecock on Transatlantic air fares to jum… |
NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
Some of us haven’t forgotten the Met Office’s Feb-April 2018 prediction of above av temps being more likely than below av ones.
But heck, some Posties still wore shorts to deliver our mail despite the snow.
Our postman wore shorts but he was from Scotland. He didn’t carry the sack all the way down from Inverness of course. That would be silly.
It’s another non forecast from the Met Office. A “low chance of this”, a “low chance of that”, “winds could often be”, “temps are more likely” etc, etc. The other phrases they often use are “changeable” and “unsettled” which British weather ALWAYS is.
All of these phrases are so vague that almost any weather can be said retrospectively to have been predicted by them.
You’re being far too hard on the Met Office. These are medium term forecasts and what you describe is all they can do. They look at past synoptic charts and see if they match recent and current charts and extrapolate from there. The uncertainties are huge.
Unless they are forecasting 30, 50 or 80 years ahead when it’s absolutely certain.
Yes but the forecast is not a game. It is used for planning and decision making.
Take winter 2010/11 the winter forecast for Dec, Jan & Feb was issued on the 23rd November 2010 and suggested a warmer than average winter. December 2010 was the coldest (&snowiest) December for 100 years. Councils were short of sand, salt and staff. The conditions made getting supplies difficult.
But they have no problem telling us what the temperature will be half a century or more in the future to a precision of one decimal place, apparently there are no uncertainties with that…
But hey, “that’s different”, right?
What good does it do to the cause of climate commonsense to advertise, as some here do, not to know the difference between weather and climate?
Tell that to the Met Office Max, they use the same supercomputer for both.
“Up to £1.2billion for weather and climate supercomputer
The latest supercomputing technology will unleash the full potential of weather and climate data for the UK
Up to £1.2 billion investment has been confirmed for a state-of-the-art supercomputer to improve severe weather and climate forecasting,
Data from the supercomputer will be used to inform Government policy as part of leading the global fight against climate change and meeting net zero emission targets.
Predicting severe weather and the impacts of climate change will be faster and more accurate than ever before, thanks to confirmation of up to £1.2 billion government funding to develop a state-of-the-art supercomputer, Business and Energy Secretary and COP26 President Alok Sharma announced today (17 February 2020).
Data from this new supercomputer – expected to be the world’s most advanced dedicated to weather and climate – will be used to help more accurately predict storms, select the most suitable locations for flood defences and predict changes to the global climate.
The new supercomputer, to be managed by the Met Office, will also be used to help ensure communities can be better prepared for weather disruption, including through:
More sophisticated rainfall predictions, helping the Environment Agency rapidly deploy mobile flood defences
Better forecasting at airports so they can plan for potential
More detailed information for the energy sector to help them mitigate against potential energy blackouts and surges
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/about-us/press-office/news/corporate/2020/supercomputer-funding-2020
In fact, the relationship between weather and climate is fractal, the same patterns appear over an infinite range of scales:
“Tomorrow’s weather: Cloudy, with a chance of fractals”
“Richardson had a reputation for having ideas decades ahead of his time. He pioneered the study of fractal geometry – the study of patterns that look the same no matter how much you magnify them – though the word “fractal” had yet to be coined. Look at the honeycomb pattern in a beehive, say, and the hexagonal structure is only visible if you’re not too close or too far away. But look at some kinds of plants and you’ll see their fronds are made up of ever-smaller versions of the overall leaf.
This is known as scale invariance, and is a feature of fractals. Richardson noticed that coastlines have a similar property, their jagged outlines appearing just as jagged as one zooms in to ever-smaller scales.
Attempting to capture this mathematically, Richardson found the same behaviour in simple formulas called power laws, by which one quantity changes according to another raised to some power.
Even something as simple as tiling your bathroom wall follows a power law: reduce the length of each square tile by 1/l and you’ll need l2 as many tiles.
Such laws also reproduce the scale invariance of objects like ferns and coastlines, which retain the same basic form no matter how big the change in scale
Click to access Fractal-weather.pdf
Oh, and I suggest you acquaint yourself with the science of Chaos Theory Max, this is a good place to start:
Click to access James%20Gleick%20-%20Chaos.%20Making%20a%20new%20science.pdf
Well Max. You make a simple point, but the climate obsessed national Met services constantly mix the two by adjusting weather to fit their climate predictions. My point about 2010/11 winter was a case where their obsession with warming permeates the near forecast as well their projections for 50 years ahead.
Weather can be forecast well, but not always perfectly, for a week ahead. The seasonal forecasts and climate predictions can never be deterministic. That is reality, not confusing weather with climate – we get that in the MSM every day.
I have a feel short-term forecasts are less accurate than, say, 20 years ago despite far superior computing power.
I appreciate this is almost impossible to measure statistically, but does anyone else suspect the same?
I wonder if there is too much trust in models rather than human experience.
“I wonder if there is too much trust in models rather than human experience.”
Indeed, they have admitted exactly that, they have no interest in data, they are only interested in their computer games – er, sorry, “climate models”.
I notice that the term ‘sudden stratospheric warming’, which apparently signals a possible cold spell, is now being bandied about by all and sundry. Because this contains the word ‘warming’, I suspect that this is an attempt by the Met Office and others to convey to the innocent public that it is something to do with ‘global warming’ – they never lose an opportunity to promote their agenda!
‘sudden stratospheric warming’
This is another case of taking something that has been happening for centuries, apply a strange name, and make it sound as though CO2 is responsible. The concepts of Polar High and Polar Front served meteorologists for many years, then modern technology allowed investigations of the Polar Vortex. And then moved into the Stratosphere.
[ /wiki/Stratosphere ]
During northern hemispheric winters, sudden stratospheric warmings, caused by the absorption of Rossby waves in the stratosphere, can be observed in approximately half of winters when easterly winds develop in the stratosphere. These events often precede unusual winter weather and may even be responsible for the cold European winters of the 1960s.
[ /wiki/Stratosphere ]
The term has been around since the 1950s
and the weather created by by the previously unknown and unnamed SSW has been with us for a lot longer than the name
It is -28°C at Calgary Int’l Airport 9:00 AM MST Thursday 23 February 2023.
The Canadians shouldn’t get to have all the fun. Arctic cold air is on the move, and there is a lot of it up there. Please enjoy, ’cause – you know – global warming™.
Oh come on “beast from the east” we older folk all know of minus 16 to 18 and 10 days of minus 12. Where are the winters of my yuff.
Quite so, sid.
The coldest I’ve seen in the Yorkshire Dales was -24 deg C, back in 1981.
We had a minus 22.5 in Berkshire in the same year
Sid, That was when the next Ice Age was on its way.
Long range weather forecasts are for entertainment purposes ONLY.
Of course, if they are right they will boast about it, and if they are wrong they will say they said it was only a low probability!
Heads they win, tails you lose!