Met Office and Microsoft to build climate supercomputer

Weather forecasting technology

Before they even build it, everyone knows what kind of answers the ‘climate supercomputer’ will be required to produce. These will then be presented as evidence of the pre-conceived climate theories, which will be tagged as ‘science’ and everyone will be expected to be impressed.
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The Met Office will work with Microsoft on a supercomputer which will help model climate change, says BBC News.

They say it will provide more accurate weather forecasting and a better understanding of climate change.

The UK government said in February 2020 it would invest £1.2bn in the project.

Met Office ‘to give forecasts from abroad’ with £1.2 billion energy-guzzling supercomputer

Weather forecasting technology

Of course they wouldn’t want to incur the wrath of climate alarmists who blame humans for the weather, since they’re closely allied with them and believe carbon dioxide, although fine for vegetation and fizzy drinks, is somehow ‘unclean’.
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H/T TheWorldNews.

Bosses at the Met Office are said to want to house half a £1.2 billion new supercomputer system outside the UK, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.

Well-placed sources say the forecasting set-up will be the most advanced in the world, but there are fears that the huge amount of energy it uses will torpedo the service’s public stance on fighting climate change.

‘The electricity this thing will use will be so massive that they want to house half of the technology somewhere like Norway where they have cleaner energy,’ one insider said.

MET Office global temperature prediction falls 0.35C in 5 years.

Back in 2016, the UK MET Office’s median projection to the start of 2021 forecast a global temperature temperature anomaly of 1.4C above their 1850-1900 “Pre-Industrial” baseline. Their recently published five year model projection (rightmost blue blob on graph), shows a 2021 median anomaly 0.35C lower, at 1.05C.

Their HADcruT 4GL temperature time series (data since 2016 added in red on graph) shows a linear trend of +0.09C/semi-decade for the last 50 years. CO2, by far the biggest forcing in their model, is still rising in lockstep with the 50 year temperature trend. What could have caused this remarkable downward step change in their model output?

Crystal ball time as the BBC and Met Office unveil their climate postcode lottery

Brits can get their fix of climate doom here. All based on greenhouse gas theory, even though the greenhouse itself is mythical. What could possibly go wrong? Just ‘Enter your postcode above to reveal how hot it could get near you’, says the BBC. Will you be roasted, flooded or maybe both?
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How high might temperatures climb where you live – and is it likely to rain more?

The BBC and the Met Office have looked at the UK’s changing climate in detail to find out.

The Met Office climate projections cover different levels of global warming.

Met Office: Snowy UK winters could become thing of the past

UK winter weather forecast [image credit: BBC]

It’s nearly Christmas so maybe time to get the old chestnuts out, and this one is now 20 years old. Let’s see how it fares in the next 20.
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By the 2040s most of southern England may no longer get sub-zero days, new Met Office data suggests.

It is one of a series of projections about how UK’s climate could change, shared with BBC Panorama.

It suggests by the 2040s most of southern England could no longer see sub-zero days. By the 2060s only high ground and northern Scotland are still likely to experience such cold days.

A cool July ends with notable heat

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We learn that ‘The UK as a whole was -0.8°C below the long-term (1981-2010) average for the month.’ This is described as ‘a fairly unremarkable month’ until a warm last day. Would it also have been unremarkable if it was 0.8C *above* the long-term average?

Official blog of the Met Office news team

July 2020 was looking to be a fairly unremarkable month in terms of climate statistics for the UK, until hot conditions closed the month on the 31^st.

Overall it was a cool month, with most days having temperatures below average. Successive low pressure systems brought cloud, rain and predominantly westerly winds across parts of the UK, keeping temperatures down. The UK as a whole was -0.8°C below the long-term (1981-2010) average for the month. As the anomaly map indicates, the south-east of the UK was the only region to get close to average temperatures for July.

One outlier of the July statistics is the maximum temperatures recorded on Friday 31^st July. Tim Legg from the Met Office’s National Climate Information Centre, said: “An area of low pressure in the Atlantic acted to draw warm air up from the continent, bringing a day of heat to much of…

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Met Office: Creating a five-year window into future climate

Using computer models to make climate predictions? All we can say is: good luck with that.
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Providing annually-updated five-year climate predictions at global and continental scales is the focus of a new international science collaboration co-ordinated by the WMO and led by the UK’s Met Office.

For the first time, climate scientists have joined forces and resources to produce an annually-updated climate snapshot looking at the next five years.

Harnessing the best computer models from ten climate centres around the world, every year will produce a new climate prediction looking out to five years ahead.

BBC: Can computers solve UK weird weather puzzle?

Credit: BBC

What weird weather puzzle? Static high or low pressure systems (blocking patterns) are not that uncommon or unusual, but are likely to be pounced on by headline-seeking climate alarmists. And statistics for calendar months (‘wettest February’) are to some extent just arbitrary period selection. Better theories might be at least as useful as fancier computers.
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A top climate scientist has called for more investment in climate computing to explain the UK’s recent topsy turvy weather, reports BBC News.

Prof Tim Palmer from Oxford University said there were still too many unknowns in climate forecasting.

And in the month the SpaceX launch grabbed headlines, he said just one of the firm’s billions could transform climate modelling.

UK Met Office promotes climate alarmism and ‘net zero’ energy policies

In this blog post by the Met Office, everyday weather forecasting barely gets a look-in. Now it’s about ‘inevitable climate changes’ and so on. The whole thing reeks of propaganda, and we can expect another 30 years of it.
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In Part I of this two-part blog series (published yesterday) Professor Albert Klein Tank described the history and highlights of the Met Office Hadley Centre over the past 30 years, says the UK Met Office.

Here the Director of the Met Office Hadley Centre focuses on the future.

The next 30 years

In the next 30 years, the role of climate science at the Met Office Hadley Centre will evolve to one of quantifying the predicted changes in climate, and providing more detailed information on what these changes mean to individuals.

How can we help societies plan for the future and manage the risks from extreme climate events and avoid impacts which are too drastic to cope with?

Self-isolation proves a boon to rainfall project

OCR software isn’t up to the job apparently. Let’s hope they don’t resort to data ‘adjustments’ after all the public’s efforts. Rain is a popular topic in the UK.

Scientists have been amazed at the public’s response to help digitise the UK’s old rainfall records, reports BBC News.

Handwritten numbers on documents dating back 200 years are being transferred to a spreadsheet format so that computers can analyse past weather patterns.

The volunteers blitzed their way through rain gauge data from the 1950s, 40s and 30s in just four days.

Project leader Prof Ed Hawkins had suggested the work might be a good way for people to use self-isolation time.

“It’s been incredible. I thought we might get this far after three or four weeks, not three or four days,” he told BBC News.

England’s water resource muddle

Mixed messages ahead. Can anyone explain the apparent discrepancies?

The UK Department of Environment, Food & Rural Affairs has issued a warning: large areas of England will face significant risk of drought due to climate change, and water companies need to find billions of extra liters per day by 2050 to keep up, reports New Atlas.

But days earlier we had this from the Met Office Press Office:
Climate change to bring heavier rainfall events.

MET-Office wants your money for a new supercomputer, but has given up decadal forecasting

Well this is a disappointment.

After the fiasco in 2018 when I revealed the data-shifting technique the MET-Office were using to never be wrong about their ‘decadal’ forecast, and the late update in 2019 , the MET-O have now disappeared the ‘decadal’ forecast altogether. This after they promised to update it in January 2020.

EDIT: The forecast has been found! See comments below.

Met Office forecasters set for ‘billion pound’ supercomputer

A beefier computer is still just a computer. The report says ‘Around half of the processing work – the research devoted to climate change – could be located in countries blessed with easy sources of clean energy. Iceland with its geothermal sources and Norway with its hydropower are both possibilities’.

Ever wondered why your village was suddenly flooded by a thunderstorm the weather forecasters hadn’t mentioned? Or why they failed to warn you about the dense fog shrouding your home in the morning?

The fact is that predicting the “big picture” of future conditions has got a lot better – Storm Dennis was spotted six days before it arrived, says BBC News.

But getting local forecasts right – street by street and hour by hour – is still a massive challenge.

And that might now change as the Met Office secures the help of a supercomputer project costing £1.2bn.

Barometric pressure in London ‘highest in 300 years’ at least

High pressure over the UK

This is happening at the time of the deepest solar minimum for over a century. A Met Office tweet shown in the article states the record was set in January 1902: ‘UK record of 1053.6 hPa, Aberdeen 31.1.1902’.

Wikipedia says: ‘solar cycle [14] lasted 11.5 years, beginning in January 1902 and ending in July 1913. The maximum smoothed sunspot number (SIDC formula) observed during the solar cycle was 107.1, in February 1906 (the lowest since the Dalton Minimum)’.

The obvious similarity between January 1902 and January 2020, and indeed between solar cycles 14 and 24, could be a coincidence – but is it?
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The weather forecasters have just given us an impressive display of their skill by predicting the scale of the current high pressure zone over the UK, says BBC News.

Overnight, Sunday into Monday, London’s Heathrow Airport recorded a barometric pressure of 1,049.6 millibars (mbar).

It’s very likely the highest pressure ever recorded in London, with records dating back to 1692.

But the UK Met Office and the European Centre for Medium Range Forecasts had seen it coming well ahead of time.

UK weather latest: Downpours set to last ‘until end of August’

Credit: BBC

What happened to the ‘unprecedented’, ‘new normal’ hot weather that blew in from north Africa for a few days, then blew away again? Or was that just the media and warmist climate pundits shooting the breeze for yet another opportunistic headline? In any case it looks as if the Great British Summer is now back to its usual erratic self, but becoming somewhat wetter than the seasonal average.

Thunderstorms and heavy downpours are set to hit the UK this week, as Brits face what could be one of the wettest Augusts on record, says the Evening Standard.

Severe thunderstorm warnings are in place for London and the south east on Monday, with the chance of flooding, travel disruption and power cuts, the Met Office warns.

GWPF is Having a Contest To Guess 2019’s Temperature

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Predicting a global temperature rise during a solar minimum might be over-optimistic.

sunshine hours

GWPF is having a contest to guess 2019’s Temperature.

My chart of HADCRUT temperatures is below. Note how close Feb 2018 came to Feb 1878! .403 to .528

With GWPF readers having trounced the Met Office at predicting temperatures for 2018, it will very interesting to see if you can do just as well for 2019.

So we hereby announce the 2019 HadCRUT temperature prediction competition. Once again, the opportunity is there to win some magnificent prizes: more whisky, and your choice of a book from the growing range of GWPF titles.

Of course the real prize on offer is to do better than the boys in Exeter. The Met Office are again being very aggressive on the warming front. They are predicting a 0.19°C warming next year (!), plus or minus 0.12°C. So their predicted range is 0.67-0.91°C.

So will carbon dioxide sweep all before it as they think? Will…

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MET-Office update: There is no update.

In the meantime, here’s how the 2016-2021 forecast (in blue) is doing compared to the latest data (red trace).

Last year, I wrote a short post entitled Met-Office invents infallible climate prediction method, in which I showed how the MET-Office would always update their ‘decadal’ (actually semi-decadal) climate prediction before the data caught up with them.

At the time, they were promising to update their prediction in January of this year. But they haven’t, despite describing themselves as “WMO Lead Centre for Annual-to-Decadal Climate Prediction“. So instead, I’ve done a retrospective update of the data on their 2016 to 2021″decadal” prediction.

Climate silly season continues: UK’s future climate

Hot on the heels of the latest, much-derided US climate report, the UK Met. Office’s crystal ball gazers have waded in with their own prognostications. They offer a ‘range of future scenarios’ which are based on concentrations of trace gases in the atmosphere, because that’s what they believe matters the most. Their predictions, or projections, are…predictable. Look out for words like ‘could be’ and ‘up to’.

The UK’s most comprehensive picture yet of how the climate could change over the next century has been launched today by Environment Secretary Michael Gove.

The UK Climate Projections 2018 (UKCP18) include:

— UK’s most comprehensive projections of climate change
— Data gives most detailed picture yet of temperature, rainfall and sea level rise over next century
— Cutting-edge science to help businesses and homes plan for the future

Gravesend-Broadness weather station closes

No-one is quite sure why this weather station – which the late Tim Channon featured several times here at the Talkshop – so often came top of UK temperature lists, apart from being close to London. But KentLive News offered this believe-it-or-not clue: ‘The soil at Broadness is also said to heat up rather quickly under direct sunlight, which is part of the reason why it records some record breaking temperatures.’ Having only opened in 1995, its short-lived fame – or was it notoriety? – will now have to pass to somewhere else.
H/T PM

A weather station that has recorded some of the hottest temperatures in the UK is no more, reports KentOnline.

It’s been revealed a weather station renowned for recording some of the UK’s hottest temperatures has closed.

The Met Office has decided to shut the Gravesend-Broadness weather station on the Swanscombe peninsula after “significant changes to the site.”

Met Office fakes the Foehn effect

Descending air in the atmosphere rises in temperature as it is adiabatically compressed in the pressure gradient created by gravity acting on atmospheric mass. This has been known for centuries. However, the MET Office has decided to do away with this fundamental fact of physics in a short video it has produced.

Here is some more information on what we mean by the Foehn Effect pic.twitter.com/h8Zr9XJ2Y2

— Met Office (@metoffice) October 23, 2018

Even their own website page on the Foehn effect (now safely screenshotted and web-cited) tells us:

“ foehn air… becomes warmer and drier on the leeside after it is compressed with descent due to the increase in pressure towards the surface.”