Tuesday
Feb012011
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill More trouble at t' Met
Feb 1, 2011 Climate: MetOffice Autonomous Mind, who is doing sterling work, has got his hands on some Met Office board minutes. They probably wish he hadn't.
Reader Comments (9)
they had their minutes ... now they can count the hours
And I'm not a horse.
Quack.
Tigger could count better LOL
Now here is a pretty thing.
It would appear that this Met Office probability forecast was based on Ensemble Forecasting and as such the Met Office could never have predicted the extreme cold weather experienced this winter. It transpires this widely used method of forecasting 'averages out' extreme weather events. This method cannot be used to predict extremes of weather. It is a widely known problem, but one that appears in this instance that has never been relayed to the government.
The long range/seasonal Met Office probabilty forecast falls if the weather turns extreme.
We have been led up the Met Office garden path over this forecast, the background to it, the context in which it was made, and the claims that the Met Office did forecast extremely cold weather.
What is ensemble forecasting?
Anthony Hanwell:
From the horse's mouth:
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/areas/data-assimilation-and-ensembles/ensemble-forecasting/explanation
The fundamental problems with the Met Office long range forecast are:
1. They have no skill at all (I hate the Mannian use of the word skill, but here its in the same category of uselessness)
2. Their prediction, as shown by Katabasis FOI, appeared to be (a) frequency of a cold winter over the CET historical period is 1 in 5 and (b) because we believe in AGW, an unspecified fudge factor was used to account for warming, giving us the chance of a cold winter of 1 in 20.
Note that no supercomputer was used and the papers shown by Katabasis show that all that was presented was a couple of default Excel spreadsheet graphs. An A level student could have done this for their homework.
I understand their budget is £170 Million. With a laptop and 1/100 of that budget I would be very happy to provide a more usable, honest forecast where the probabilities actually make sense. It would probably still not have skill, but no-one would notice the difference.
When the Met Office Board decided to "re-brand" the long range forecast, it clearly isn't worth shit. And does the government actually employ any civil servants who are numerate and can say "this is bollocks"?
Roger Harrabin posting on WUWT but steering clear of that question.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/02/01/bbcs-roger-harrabin-responds/
This, from the same person who was mollycoddling Jo Abbess
Why is anyone surprised that the Met Office continued to make seasonal weather forecasts? When they said they were discontinuing them I always assumed that they meant that they were ceasing to publish them, not ceasing to make them. You would expect an organisation like the Met Office to continue to do research on longer term weather forecasts and it is understandable that they should be reluctant to publish them until they had some confidence in them just as an author would not want an early draft of a book to be published.