"yttiw" wrote in message news:2013082314464610142-cuddles@britpostcom...

On 2013-08-23 13:12:48 +0000, Jim Cannon said:

The secret lies with who they subsequently blame if the forecast goes
wrong - the computer or themselves? Also who they congratulate if the
forecast is correct - the computer or themselves?
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What would give this - perfectly legitimate IMO - approach more credence
would be to place it on an objective basis.

It surely ought to be relatively simple to take the various models'
numerical forecasts (are these the GRIB files or is that something else?)
and devise a methodology to calculate the correlation between them, weighted
presumably for the UK as a specific region and with progressively less
weight further away. You could then condense the correlation down to a
single index, eg 'the Consensus Index (CI)' (TM) and express it on a scale
of eg 0-100 (%, if you like). Then when the CI reached some significant
threshold value like 50% or 60% or some such, you could flag this as a
potentially noteworthy event.

Very possibly this is being done anyway by the professionals. I guess what
I'm curious about is how accessible this is to the amateur community, given
a sufficiently (mathematically) skilled user and access to to the
appropriate data files. Are the forecast files available in a gridded
format, ie something more numerical than chart?

JGD