What about the forcast in the states?

[Stemalot]

another reason not to check the weather forcast...

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/20040831/WEATHER31/TPFront/TopStories

 

 

Original story:

Summer chill leaves experts with red faces

 

Canada's weather forecasters are confessing that their predictions for the summer season were so wretched that Canadians would have known roughly as much without any forecast at all.

 

"Never have we been so wrong for so long in so many parts of the country," said David Phillips, the senior climatologist at Environment Canada.

 

Richard Verret, in charge of the weather element division at the Canadian Meteorological Centre, was equally blunt. "It turned out that the forecast was not very good, to say the least," he said. "In fact, it's been a particularly bad forecast."

 

Canada's weather agency, hand in hand with its supercomputer and complex global climate models, had predicted that June, July and August would be warmer and drier than usual right across the country.

 

But when all was said and done, it was a stinker of a summer nearly everywhere: cool, wet and dull. In fact, it was the coolest summer since 1992, when Mount Pinatubo spewed ash into the atmosphere.

 

Winnipeg had the coldest summer on record. Crops froze in Saskatchewan. And Toronto chalked up about 125 fewer hours of summer sunshine than people have come to expect: just 700 compared to the normal 825.

 

Vancouver, Victoria and Yukon were some of the few parts of the country that were hot and dry.

 

"It would be nice to get more accurate forecasts," said Terry Pugh, executive secretary of the National Farmers Union in Saskatoon, noting that farmers plant different crops in line with predictions about the length of the growing season.

 

He said the unexpected chill over the Prairies already has delayed ripening by two or three weeks.

 

Being an agency that lives and dies by its statistics, the meteorological centre, known as the Canadian Met, naturally keeps figures on the accuracy of its seasonal forecasts. In other words, the Met meticulously marks itself and publishes the figures on its website.

 

(It doesn't do the same for daily forecasts.)

 

It is able to predict, on the basis of past forecasts, how accurate its seasonal forecasts are likely to be. After the fact, it releases a score of how accurate it actually was.

 

The dirty secret is that even a chimp forecasting the temperature of a coming season would be right a third of the time, statistically speaking, because the temperature is predicted as being either above normal, normal or below normal.

 

So if the accuracy of the forecast comes out at 33 per cent or less, it means that the forecaster has no skill at all, Mr. Verret noted.

 

Sometimes, the Met's skill score can hover around 60 per cent or even 70 per cent, but most of the time it runs at less than 50 per cent, he said. (That is to say, the forecast is wrong at least half the time.)

 

This summer, it has been far worse. In fact, Mr. Verret said if he were to forecast the summer skill score, which won't be crunched until next week, he would peg it at 37 to 40 per cent. That's not significantly above sheer chance. That means Canadians got nearly as much accurate weather information this summer as they would have had without any forecast at all.

 

And that's just for the temperature. What about precipitation?

 

"It's hopeless," Mr. Verret said. "There, we have no skill at all."

 

This state of affairs weighs on the forecasters. "You're only as good as your last forecast," Mr. Phillips noted, sighing.

 

Mr. Verret is trying to come to terms with it.

 

"Being in the forecast business, you learn to be humble," he said ruefully.

 

In the agency's defence, Mr. Phillips pointed out that the signs leading up to the summer forecast were persuasive about a warm and dry scenario.

 

The ocean water on the West Coast and in the Labrador Sea was so superheated it was like a "hot tub," he said, measuring more than 3 degrees above normal. Usually, as the water goes, so goes the land.

 

Not this year. Instead, the great swath of Central Canada was cooled off all summer by a ferociously cold spring in the Arctic tundra, the second-coldest on record and a big climate surprise after the years of extraordinarily warm temperatures in the Arctic.

 

Those switchbacks, a feature scientists say is characteristic of global climate change, make forecasts even trickier than usual, Mr. Phillips said.

 

"Luckily, Canadians are very forgiving," he said. "They'll ask you what went wrong with the forecast, and their next question will be, 'What's the winter going to be like?' "

[Dru]

It's gonna be a frozen winter full of ICE!!!!! ICE ICE ICE! And no snow. No avalanches, no freshiez, drive-by access to remote alpine ice climbs

[iain]

The forecast for the USA for the next 48hrs is showers of blind patriotism with a 100% chance of mixed metaphor, bullshit level 7000ft and falling fast. Hot air gusts out of the NYC area at 200mph.

[Stemalot]

shouldn't bullshit level be rising?

[murraysovereign]

The bullshit meter got overloaded and broke down several weeks ago. No sense trying to repair it, either, until the storm has passed, 'cause the new one would probably just get swept away by the force of the squalls.