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The Met Office is to stop publishing its quarterly weather forecasts after being castigated for not foreseeing the last wet summer or this extreme winter.
‘Although we can identify general patterns of weather, the science does not exist to allow an exact forecast beyond five days, or to absolutely promise a certain type of weather,’ a spokesman said.
Though this admission is something most of us probably guessed already, the new monthly predictions won’t have the same element of risk about them. We looked forward to last year’s forecast of a ‘blistering’ summer and hoped right up to the end that we would get a bit of it!
I recall many years ago a correspondent of the Sunday Express, whose name I now forget, wrote regular weather forecasts based on the records he and his father had kept for many years. Now and again, the newspaper ran an article on this man whose long-range forecasts were generally accurate and better than those put out by the Met Office. Then, of a sudden, we heard no more of him and we supposed that he had died. Thereafter, we had to rely on the Met Office and, I suppose, realised that there was an element of risk about long-range forecasting.
But, frankly, does anyone much care that long-range forecasts have been abandoned? After all, complaining about the weather has been a British trait for years!
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The Met Office is to stop publishing its quarterly weather forecasts after being castigated for not foreseeing the last wet summer or this extreme winter.
‘Although we can identify general patterns of weather, the science does not exist to allow an exact forecast beyond five days, or to absolutely promise a certain type of weather,’ a spokesman said.
Though this admission is something most of us probably guessed already, the new monthly predictions won’t have the same element of risk about them. We looked forward to last year’s forecast of a ‘blistering’ summer and hoped right up to the end that we would get a bit of it!
I recall many years ago a correspondent of the Sunday Express, whose name I now forget, wrote regular weather forecasts based on the records he and his father had kept for many years. Now and again, the newspaper ran an article on this man whose long-range forecasts were generally accurate and better than those put out by the Met Office. Then, of a sudden, we heard no more of him and we supposed that he had died. Thereafter, we had to rely on the Met Office and, I suppose, realised that there was an element of risk about long-range forecasting.
But, frankly, does anyone much care that long-range forecasts have been abandoned? After all, complaining about the weather has been a British trait for years!
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