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This posting expresses the personal view and opinions of the author.
Something which everyone on this planet should be able to do.
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Norman, clearly you are correct when you say that the 12Z runs were *apparently*
ignored. But the Chief forecaster on duty must have had his reasons as one would
ignore model data at your peril, particularly when it is backed up by the GFS or
other models. Perhaps he was "twitchy" (as I was) about the low developing in a
data sparse area, the obvious developmental satellite imagery and the analysed
160 knot plus jet ?

Will.
--

" Being an expert is no guarantee against being dead wrong "
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Norman Lynagh wrote in message ...
In message , Bernard Burton
writes

I think that the Met Office would be well served if it did a thorough
investigation into why the GFS model got this one essentially correct, and
the Bracknell model was so far off track. They should both have used the
same data base, with the same inaccuracies and gaps. Is the problem in the
model formulation, or is it being 'fine tuned' by human intervention still?
Could it be that some essential observations are being ignored or rejected
by the Met Office model? Perhaps if less money was spent on ensembles, which
have very limited application in the real world, and more on improving the
observational network, we may see some improvement.

--
Bernard Burton
Wokingham, Berkshire, UK.


Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but .............

The GFS model did, indeed, handle this one pretty well. I was following
it closely in the days leading up to the event and it consistently
predicted relatively light winds for here.

What I found surprising was that the Met Office forecasts yesterday were
at variance from all of the model output I looked at. Yesterday's 12z
runs of the Met Office global model, Met Office mesoscale model, GFS and
GEM models all predicted a relatively shallow "Channel runner" with
light winds over most of southern England for Monday. In contrast, the
issued Met Office 24-hour prog valid for 12z Monday showed a 973mb low
centred between Cambridge and Peterborough with a very tight gradient on
its southern flank. It seems that, for some reason, a lot of the
numerical predictions were rejected.

It is disappointing that today's Met Office, with all its cutting edge
technology, has not been able to handle this situation a lot better than
its predecessor of 40 years ago might have done using only manual
methods. I haven't been following the developments over the Atlantic too
closely over the past few days. Nevertheless, I am fairly sure that the
situation was such that an experienced forecaster armed with regular
surface and upper air analyses (but no forecast products) could readily
have identified that it was a situation in which a fast moving wave
might deepen explosively and bring very strong winds into the British
Isles. Today's Met Office hasn't been able to do much better than just
that on this occasion. Perhaps one improvement was the ability to
identify today as being the day on which such an event might happen.

Even less than 12 hours before the event the forecasts proved to be
significantly inaccurate. After 11 p.m. last night the weather
presentation on BBC News24 was still showing 70 m.p.h. gusts south of a
line from North Wales to The Wash. This had been hardened up to a firm
forecast by that time.

Around 4 a.m. this morning flash warnings were issued for severe SW
gales in coastal parts of Central Southern England and SE England for
the remainder of the morning. These winds have not materialised. The
News24 presentations this morning are still plugging 60 knot gusts for
the south coast but these are not happening.

The warning issued on Sunday morning predicting "inland gusts of the
order of 70 m.p.h. across the south of the UK" and that SE England had a
40% probability of experiencing "extremely damaging inland gusts of the
order of 90 m.p.h." was still shown on the Met Office website as a
"Current Warning" at 10 a.m. this morning.

I agree with Bernard that some questions need to be asked within the Met
Office, as I am sure they will be.


(delete "thisbit" twice to e-mail)
--
Norman Lynagh Weather Consultancy
Chalfont St Giles
England