Quote of the day

Now is the winter of our discontent, made glorious summer by the Met Office computer.

Phillip Bratby, in the comments.

Met Office privately predicted cold winter

The Mail has a story that the Met Office told the cabinet to expect a cold winter. This was back in October apparently. However, as we know, the public were not told of this, apparently because the Met Office's research had suggested that there was no demand for seasonal forecasts. I'm sure most readers think their reticence was more to do with the fiasco over  2009's barbeque summer.

The story, which was sourced from Roger Harrabin at the BBC, seems to tally with the claim in the Quarmby audit that a Met Office forecast about the cold winter was issued at the end of October. However, as we also know, the Met Office website at the time seemed to be suggesting a warm winter, and nobody has actually seen the cold forecast.

All very intriguing.

In related news, RP Jnr considers the Met Office's attempts to make assessment of its forecasting ability harder.

Update on Jan 4, 2011 by Bishop Hill

Autonomous Mind has further thoughts.

Supercomputers

Autonomous Mind has interviewed Joe Bastardi and Piers Corbyn about the use of supercomputers in long-range weather forecasting. I liked Joe's last word on the subject:

It’s not the computer, it’s the limits of the computer in  trying to adjust to what only men can understand and use. I dont think you need more money to arrive at the wrong answer faster. Should put it into fighting hunger, or giving men a chance to be free enough to dream and pursue that dream… much better causes in my opinion.

Slingo on climate models

There is an interesting interview with Julia Slingo at Nature's website at the moment. No mention of climate change, but the twin spectres of Pakistan floods and Russian warmth doing service in its place as a means to drum up support for the Met Office's hoped-for new supercomputer. Scaremongering has served the weather/climate community for so long, I guess it's hard to break the habit.

What's the biggest obstacle to creating better, hazard-relevant weather forecasts?

Access to supercomputers. The science is well ahead of our ability to implement it. It's quite clear that if we could run our models at a higher resolution we could do a much better job — tomorrow — in terms of our seasonal and decadal predictions. It's so frustrating. We keep saying we need four times the computing power. We're talking just 10 or 20 million a year — dollars or pounds — which is tiny compared to the damage done by disasters. Yet it's a difficult argument to win. You just think: why is this so hard?

I'm sure I read somewhere recently that there is no guarantee that climate models at high resolution will be any better than what we have now. Can anyone recall having seen something like that?

BBC FOIs Met

Martin Rosenbaum of the excellent Open Secrets blog at the BBC has been looking at some information extracted from the Met Office under FoI.

The documents we requested show that scientists within the Met Office were uneasy about the language of [the barbeque summer] prediction. One internal report states:

"The strapline 'odds on for a barbeque summer' was created by the operations and communications teams to reflect the probability of a good summer. Concern over the use of the strapline and its relationship to the scientific information available was expressed by the scientific community, who were not consulted prior to the media release."

The Met Office then resolved to use "more conservative terminology" in future. But its seasonal prediction for last winter was also awry, failing to signal sufficiently the long and severe cold spell.

The Quarmby audit

I am grateful to commenter "hmc" for pointing out that David Quarmby has also produced an audit on the country's response to the start of the cold weather a month or so ago. This includes some further interesting information about the Met Office's advice to government:

The Met Office gave ‘early indications of the onset of a cold spell from late November’ at the end of October, but detailed forecasts of snow were not possible until a few days before the first precipitation. The amounts of snow were generally well captured, although in some areas were considerably underestimated by some weather forecast providers.

I find the quotation marks at the start of this excerpt particularly interesting. What this suggests to me is that Dr Quarmby was advised that such an "early indication" was given, but that he didn't see it himself.

I've emailed to check if this surmise is correct.

GWPF calls for inquiry into Met Office

From Benny Peiser

LONDON, 21 December 2010: The Global Warming Policy Foundation has called on the Government to set up an independent inquiry into the winter advice it received by the Met Office and the renewed failure to prepare the UK for the third severe winter in a row.

"The current winter fiasco is no longer a joke as the economic damage to the British economy as a result of the country's ill-preparedness is running at £1bn a day and could reach more than £15 billion," said Dr Benny Peiser, the GWPF's Director.

"It would appear that the Met Office provided government with rather poor if not misleading advice and we need to find out what went wrong. Lessons have to be learned well in advance of the start of next year's winter so that we are much better prepared if it is severe again," Dr Peiser said.

Maybe their computer is too small?

Delingpole has picked up on the Met Office's claims of innocence over the issuing of "mild winter" predictions and notes just how much money we are spending on not getting a long-range forecast.

So let’s get this right. We paid for 90 per cent of the Met office’s £30 million computer; we also fund a hefty chunk of its annual £170 million running costs. And now the Met office tells us that it is incapable of providing the effective long range forecasts we could get for a fraction of the price from Piers Corbyn or Joe Bastardi?

Interestingly, the other day I came across this paper produced by Sir John Beddington and his team, calling for more money to be spent on the Met Office. The Review of Climate Science Advice calls for £90 million to be spent on upgrading the Met Office's Hadley Centre, including the purchase of a shiny new supercomputer. Still, it will enable some important questions to be answered...

Q4: How can confidence in the most uncertain aspects of large-scale climate projections be improved? Answer needed perhaps by 2015, although the sooner the better to answer questions such as:
• Are current global climate projections for mitigation decisions accurate?
• What are the sign and magnitude of key cloud feedback processes?
• Is geo-engineering a safe option?
• How can aviation be operated to minimise the impacts of emissions?

I must say I agree that it would be useful to know if current global climate projections are accurate. Presumably not though, if the "sign and magnitude of key cloud feedback processes" are unknown.

Met Office says they kept mum

GWPF is reporting a press release from the Met Office in which they say they did not predict a mild winter. As far as I remember the Met Office stopped issuing long-range forecasts last year, which would tally with the press release. But I have a nagging feeling that I heard something said about it being mild again this winter.

Does anyone remember anything?

Met Office to scrap seasonal forecasts

A couple of days ago, Mrs Hill commented that she could no longer find the Met Office's seasonal forecast. We had a bit of a dig around the Met Office website and there indeed seemed to be no mention of a spring forecast.

In the rush of activity after the hearings on Monday, I neglected to follow this up, but the Met Office has now come clean anyway. The seasonal forecasts are to be scrapped.

Click to read more ...

JG-C confirms the errors in HADCRUT

John Graham-Cumming reports that the Met Office has confirmed the errors found by him and his readers. The effect of the correction will be a slight narrowing of the error bars. Well done to JG-C.

Met office data

The BBC has confirmed the release of what appears to be a subsection of the HADCRUT dataset. The party line is duly related to the masses:

The first decade of this century is "by far" the warmest since instrumental records began, say the UK Met Office and World Meteorological Organization.

Their analyses also show that 2009 will almost certainly be the fifth warmest in the 160-year record.

Reiner Grundmann, writing at Die Klimazwiebel notes the timing and describes it as a political statement. Civil service and the Voice of the Bureaucracy make political statement. Who would have thought it?

Meanwhile, analysis is underway. John Graham-Cumming (got the hyphenation right this time) has already uncovered some funnies in the data.

Met Office to review its temperature series

The news that the Met Office is going to review its global temperature series is welcome, although certain aspects to the Times' story are questionable.

For example, I would take issue with the Met Office's claim that they need to go to the national met offices to get permission to use the raw data. When CRU was questioned on their claims that the data was not distributable, it was subsequently found that there were only two (IIRC) of the raw series that had any sort of restrictions on reuse and that neither of these were significant in scope.

Click to read more ...

Sodden summers, sodding weather forecasts

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.