So how did they do?
Nick Grahame, Chief Forecaster at the Met Office offered some relief from the poor summer, saying: “The weekend weather is rather mixed with sunshine but some rain for all. However, much better weather is forecast throughout next week. Looking further ahead, September is likely to bring settled conditions.”
Following on from a record-breaking wet summer in 2007, heavy rain this August has resulted in more floods in many areas of the country. Thanks to an acceleration of its research and development programme, the Met Office is now able to pinpoint extreme rainfall more accurately.
But it wasn’t enough for them to completely fail their summer forecast. They immediately jumped into a brain-dead winter forecast.
Once again, a massive fail.
The climate models are programmed to predict warming. They are completely useless and yet the Met Office continues to stiff British taxpayers with purchases of faster GIGO hardware.
When I was younger the public was in awe of computers. The scale of ascension went something like this: brain surgeon, rocket scientist, nuclear physicist, computer programmer.
Then people got to buy personal computers and realised that computers were and by themselves, rather stupid, and not actually any more capable of logical thought than their pocket calculators.
Yet for some reason, a super computer when used to run a climate model, is supposed to have possess mystical properties still. (And apparently, it does among believers.)
My favourite climate modelling posting of all time is here:
http://climateaudit.org/2011/05/15/willis-on-giss-model-e/
This is where Willis takes GISS Model E and reverse engineers it and converts it into an Excel spreadsheet. Given that the Excel spreadsheet and the computer model running on a super computer essentially produce the same output, perhaps a few dollars could be saved by giving that super computer to researchers who might actually do something useful with it.
They have not improved. Their forecast for April was an embarrassment and May’s looks like being well offbeam, even with some warm weather forecast for next week.
http://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2012/05/05/april-weather-in-the-uk/
Glad to see our Met Office maintained its track record with its long-range forecast on 23rd April that the drought would continue through April (now officially the wettest UK April on record)) into May and June. Their prediction is here: http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/media/pdf/p/i/A3-layout-precip-AMJ.pdf – at least until they redact it to hide their embarrassment. Meanwhile this drought is getting so wet, I’m wondering if St Swithin’s Day has arrived early this year. See http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-10644550