Face-palm: Met Office super-computer designed to predict the weather for the next 100 years wrong within 48 hours

Look at the bright side. The British only wasted £20.7million...

THE boss of the cash-rich Met Office has boasted that its £41million super computer will deliver accurate forecasts “a century ahead”.

But critics say the money would have been better spent getting the next day’s forecast right.

John Hirst said taxpayers would be well served by the massive computer because it would ensure Britain leads the world in climate science.

He said £20.7million was invested in the project last year alone, taxpayers’ money “which will enable the Met Office to deliver more accurate forecasts, from hours to a century ahead”. Mr Hirst said this referred to climate change predictions.

A Met Office forecast issued last Thursday for yesterday predicted hours of sunshine in central London. But there was hardly any, with rain clouds covering the capital for much of the day. Keep on reading...

Photo of the Day: British Met Office Loses Dry Sense of Humor

The April Met Office forecast was for drought.

Photo by Delemere Lafferty

 

Climate Scientists Want a Do-Over on Temperature Record

NASA GISS Temperature Station # 425724880010

UK's Met office is pushing a surface temperature data do-over. This proposed do-over is in response to the many problems with the data sets and methods used to calculate global temperature.

FOX News reported:

After the firestorm of criticism called Climate-gate, the British government's official Meteorological Office has decided to give its modern climate data a do-over.

At a meeting on Monday of about 150 climate scientists in the quiet Turkish seaside resort of Antalya, representatives of the weather office (known in Britain as the Met Office) quietly proposed that the world's climate scientists start all over again on a "grand challenge" to produce a new, common trove of global temperature data that is open to public scrutiny and "rigorous" peer review.

In other words, conduct investigations into modern global warming in a way that may help to end the mammoth controversy over world temperature data that has been stirred up in the past few years.

Among the changes they are proposing(pdf) are:

• "verifiable datasets starting from a common databank of unrestricted data"
• "methods that are fully documented in the peer reviewed literature and open to scrutiny;"
• "a set of independent assessments of surface temperature produced by independent groups using independent methods,"
• "comprehensive audit trails to deliver confidence in the results;"
• "robust assessment of uncertainties associated with observational error, temporal and geographical in homogeneities."

Wouldn't 'real' scientists have already done these things already? It sounds like an admission their records and methods are not: well documented, peer reviewed, independent, well audited or robust. Hmm... And the world is supposed to commit trillions of dollars to prevent man-made global warming based on this and similar data?

UK Met Office Flip-flops and Agrees To Re-examine Data

In a flip-flop from their November 24th statement completely reaffirming global warming, the UK Met office has announced there is reason to re-examine 160 years of temperature data after admitting that Climategate has shattered public confidence in the science of man-made global warming.

The Met Office plans to re-examine 160 years of temperature data after admitting that public confidence in the science on man-made global warming has been shattered by leaked e-mails.

The new analysis of the data will take three years, meaning that the Met Office will not be able to state with absolute confidence the extent of the warming trend until the end of 2012.

The UK Met Office has also promised to release some data and code.