OK Graham ,what about this winter then ?

RonB
"Graham P Davis" wrote in message
...
BlueLightning wrote:

Yep - one of those - if you touch the water, it might be wet comments.

A disclaimer should be made by anyone attempting to do a long range
forecast.

Some people out there seem rather confused. They seem to believe them
hook, line and sinker. All the media have to do is put out a bit of
doom-mongering, and people's tongues start waggling.

The atmosphere up there is 'chaotic'
There is no way, that even the most powerful models or computer system
can forecast with any accuracy the positions of Low and High pressure
way ahead into the future.
Those weather systems do not exist yet. All they can do is follow
trends

During complex situations (especially the rain/sleet/snow boundary area
during the winter months) we can see just how difficult it is to
forecast the next twenty four hours.

Why is it, that people seem so desperate to want to know what the
weather will be doing in four or five months time. I understand people
like aircraft pilots needing to know the weather in advance for
flights... but why invite idle speculation. We're heading into the
autumn / winter period, we'll find out soon enough !!

I think some people are being blinded by their strong wish for an
interesting winter / lots of snow, etc etc

For pete's sake, keep Critical and Rational thinking as a top priority.
It is essential

It is perfectly possible to forecast a month or so ahead, and has been for
many years. You just have to use different methods from short- and
medium-range forecasting and limit yourself to general distributions of
pressure, temperature, etc. You also need to admit that, on some
occasions,
the tools you are relying on won't provide you with enough information to
make a reliable forecast. For instance, if you are using SST anomaly
patterns and they are strong you can be fairly confident about forecasting
next month's pressure anomalies, but if the patterns are nondescript you
may have to go for a low-confidence forecast of average weather and hope
for the best.

The difficulty with long-range forecasting for the UK is that it's such a
small place. I remember that, for one January (in the late sixties I
think), the SST patterns correctly predicted strong easterly winds across
the whole of Europe and across the Atlantic to Canada. Unfortunately, the
only small error was over the UK where the winds were southerly.

In some, probably very rare cases, it's possible to forecast trends for
several years. In 1969 I correctly forecast that the severely cold weather
that had affected East Greenland waters for a decade was coming to an end
and, from the beginning of the seventies, Eastern Canada would have a run
of severe winters instead. This was a forecast I would have put money on
but, as a young Civil Servant, I didn't have any! ;-)

--
Graham Davis
Bracknell
It was raining cats and dogs and I fell in a poodle. - Chic
Murray(1919-1985)