:gordon ramsay mode on..

i mean everyone is ****ing wrong arent they?

your ****ing right all the time arent you? mr NO ****ing no forecast. mr
no balls.

no history, no techinical knowledge, doesnt event know what a rosby wave
is, no visible track record.

:gordon ramsay mode off


On 09/11/2010 4:34 PM, Dawlish wrote:

And so have you.

Amazingly, it's not a "swipe" it's frustration that forecasting is not
better than it is. I *always* support MetO professional forecasters
(forget what Dixon says, he's hardly objective), but I will have the
courage pick them up when forecasts aren't right and not be
sycophantic. What the public want are accurate forecasts.
Unfortunately that is not possible to meet that demand at present, so
what we need are forecasters and forecasting agencies with little
hubris and a great deal of willingness to acknowledge failings and to
explain. If that were the case, the MetO and its employees would have
*far* more public support than they do at present. "Better safe than
sorry" has been the forecasting maxim since the October 1987 storm; a
truism reflected in the severe weather warning site and commented upon
often by so many others, apart from me.

dont waste your breath stephen.

On 09/11/2010 8:18 AM, Stephen Davenport wrote:
On Nov 9, 7:18 am, wrote:


"Better safe than sorry" is the forecasting maxim these days.

No it isn't, and frankly, if you'll forgive me, that's a pretty unfair
swipe at professional meteorologists.
Stephen.

On Nov 9, 9:11*pm, John Hall wrote:


Isn't part of the difficulty with assessing these warnings due to the
fact that when they are issued some days in advance they inevitably have
to be couched in terms of probabilities? So they will be expressed as a
40%, 60% or 80% chance of the extreme event occurring in a particular
region. How do you assess in isolation whether a single such a warning
was correct? All you can do is take maybe a year's supply and see if
roughly the right percentage came to pass. (And even that isn't easy.
What if certain places in a region hit the extreme weather threshold but
others don't. I think that should count as a correct warning. But of
course not everywhere has a reliable recording station.)


Very valid points. We're molving into the sphere of 'risk
communication'.

Subjective on-the-spot verifications are very untrustowrthy - a
relatively benign day might be experienced in one's back garden while
10 miles up the road there is 40cm of snow. A regional warning of
disruptive snow would therefore of course be correct but viewed as
incorrect through the former observer's window.

Stephen.

well said

On 09/11/2010 10:23 AM, Richard Dixon wrote:
On Nov 9, 8:18 am, Stephen wrote:
On Nov 9, 7:18 am, wrote:

He's got plenty of previous. The usual course is make your point, make
your point again and then just give up and ignore.

Richard

and you where the merchant of no-forecast
pot, kettle, black.



On 09/11/2010 7:18 AM, Dawlish wrote:
Garrigill, Cumbria. 421m ASL.

And Lyneside, Dave. Someone else remembers. Last week's merchant of
non-outcome doom was Jon. I don't mean the MetO.