Bishop Hill Sodden summers, sodding weather forecasts
Jul 2, 2007 Climate: MetOffice So, the weather is crap. It's been crap for two months, and now the Met Office is forecasting that there may well be no summer at all this year.
Great. Just great. Exactly what I need in a summer when we're not going away.
But are they right though? The Met Office publishes a forecast for the summer months, and updates it through the months of April, May and June. Let's take a look and see just how reliable they are.
When they started out back in April, this is what they were saying:
The latest seasonal forecast from the Met Office issued today, reveals that this summer is, yet again, likely to be warmer than normal. Following the trend set throughout 2006 and the first part of 2007, seasonal forecasters say there is a high probability that summer temperature will exceed the 1971-2000 long-term average of 14.1 °C. They also suggest the chances of temperatures similar to those experienced in 2003 and 2006 are around 1 in 8. The forecast for rainfall is less certain, and currently there are no indications of an increased risk of a particularly dry or particularly wet summer.
In other words it looks very much as if they got it 100 percent wrong. They essentially repeated this forecast in May. By the start of June they were standing by their temperature forecast, but said of the rainfall:
Current rainfall indications suggest that over the summer as a whole southern parts of the UK are more likely to experience average or below-average rainfall, while the north is more likely to see average or above-average rainfall.
Given the fact that June was pretty average, temperature-wise (78th hottest on CETR), and that the rainfall has been rather different to what they forecasted too (the numbers are not published yet, but I think it's fair to say that anything in the ballpark of "average" just didn't happen) it seems reasonable to conclude that they haven't the faintest idea what is going to happen.
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