Richard Dixon wrote:

Paul Bartlett notwithstanding, do we have any resident people who
yearly attempt to do some pattern-matching with previous years ahead
of the forthcoming winter? If so, can we have your thoughts please?

No movement from the UCL guys for this winter (Adam Lea are you
reading?!) http://climate.mssl.ucl.ac.uk/for_nao.html - nor the MO,
I'm always interested to see what ounce of useful information we can
get out of these forecasts.


I lost faith in pattern-matching as a long-range-forecasting tool in the
late autumn of 1963 I think it was. The monthly forecast mentioned a
particular year as having the best match for the month just ending. As it
was a fairly recent year I still had a vague memory of it and thought that
the weather had been completely different. I checked the monthly summary
concerned and found that one month was described as mild, dry and sunny,
whereas the other was said to have been cool, cloudy and wet. I said at the
time that I didn't have much faith in the LRF for the coming month when the
two matching months synoptic-wise were completely opposite weather-wise. The
forecast, unsurprisingly, turned out to be totally wrong.


--
Graham P Davis, Bracknell, Berks., UK. E-mail: newsman not newsboy
"I wear the cheese. It does not wear me."