Drought Looms!

From the Daily Express, across the rapidly rising pond, but adjacent to the smaller and rapidly shrinking pond, apparently:

BRITAIN could be plunged into drought misery within months because of the record hot summer that’s on the way.

Experts gave the warning yesterday as sailors, left, made the most of a full Bewl Water reservoir, the largest stretch of open water in South-east England.

Perhaps UK natives in the audience could help me understand better the remarkable predictive powers of your forecast community, or the remarkable journalistic standards of the Daily Express?

9 Comments

  1. I apply the following equation:

    Daily Express + Weather Stories = Ignore

    Although it’s possible to drop the “Weather Stories” term and get pretty much the same result – unless you’re a Princess Diana conspiracy theorist.

  2. John, possibly I’m being dense, but I read the story and don’t understand your criticism of it.

  3. Sorry. Too obtuse. My experience with forecasters is that none would ever forecast a “record hot summer” for any particular location. And any who did, I would not believe. They might forecast odds favoring warmer than average temperatures (in fact, these days they always do), and/or odds favoring wetter than average or drier than average. So either we’ve got remarkably daring forecasting or remarkably bad journalism.

  4. If Dano had written

    Perhaps UK natives in the audience could help me understand better the remarkable predictive powers of your forecast community, or the remarkable journalistic standards of the Daily Express?

    it would instantly be read as sarcasm.

    Mr Fleck writes that and, well, I have to get out of my comfortable box.

    Best,

    D

  5. “remarkably daring forecasting or remarkably bad journalism”

    Both really. There is a plethora of commercial forecasters in the UK at the moment and some of the more er, “fringe” organisations (often one single person) need to sensationalise things a bit to get their name out there. They also tend to concentrate on LRFs (for their free output at least) as the Met Office is (correctly) very reserved with its ones. As a lot of the public want definitives these LRFs can be published and “the forecasters” (normally the Met Office) tend to get the blame for incorrect ones (which is the vast majority) in the public’s eyes – partly because newspapers tend to lump all forecasters together.

    Add to that the bad journalism of the Express which will look for the most sensationalist slant on any weather story it can (from “Arctic Winters”, “Killer Storms” to “Deadly Heatwaves”) and it’ll quote any press release and cherry-pick quotes to get the most extreme out of it.

    Many years ago, the Extress had a reasonable reputation for a newspaper. It was going downhill before it got bought out by a porn barren, but the slump has been hastened somewhat.

  6. “(often one single person)”

    Usually the same single person 🙂

    IIRC The Hadley Centre did forecast a ~60% probability of the warmest year ever, but that was globally, and regional uncertainty will generally be higher. I’m not sure if that forecast has been updated eg in the light of the El Nino situation…

  7. I meant to say that the MetO used to say that their seasonal forecasts were experimental (they may still do that but I can’t see it now) and I tend to still treat them as such. Last time I saw their analysis figures they reckoned on a ~60% accuracy figure, IIRC.

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