In three short weeks the BoM rain Outlook prediction gets shot to pieces by real world weather.
This inset map shows the BoM predicted on 28th October that the Brisbane region had only a 45% chance of average rain for the November to January period.
To see the original map select the 28th October 2008 rain prediction.
Sadly for the BoM prediction a series of high rainfall storms hit the region from the 18th-20th November
see map inset of rain anomalies from 1st to 23rd November.
You can make various rain maps at this BoM site
See earlier articles re BoM rain Outlook failures:
At the risk of being contrarian for the sake of it, the BOM can hardly be blamed for missing a weather event in a climate modelling forecast.
On the other hand, they’ve been consistently wrong for quite a long time, haven’t they Warwick? It’s amazing that they haven’t managed to strike it lucky even by chance.
How are you JohnA.
There are earlier articles last Autumn expressing my views re BoM 3 month Outlooks.
Also when I drew attention to Prof Vizard’s paper where he found aspects of the BoM rain predictions “totally useless”.
I doubt that weather can be predicted even 10 days ahead, let alone the 30-90 that the BoM attempt. Every month when their Outlooks are issued the media runs the BoM puff n nonsense as though it is fact.The media never examine the results in 3 months time, so I do.
Warwick,
I very much admire your work. However, in terms of long range weather forecasting, the discussion is not complete, at least here in Oz, unless you consider Inigo Jones and Lennox Walker and the accuracy (or not) of their forecasts. It seems to me that the record shows that they were/are able to make accurate forecasts quite a long way ahead, and show the BOM up more than somewhat.
I have not been aware that the predictions of Inigo Jones and Lennox Walker are freely available online to facilitate some checks being made. Let me know if I have missed them.
There is an article online by Tim Sherratt discussing Inigo Jones work and I have ordered a couple of books from the library. I also see the ANL has several Inigo Jones publications, which I will check out in due course. Thanks for nudging me to look into this.