Here we go again – another month and the BoM Outlooks seem to be getting worse – if that is possible.
Starting with rain – how do they get SW WA so EXACTLY WRONG ??
They have a win with the predicted wet in SE Qld-NE NSW – I will not quibble over the tiny green patch near Glen Innes which really should be in darker blue.
The predicted dry in Victoria & Tasmania turned out wet or average.
The predicted dry in Nth Qld turned out really wet.
Vast areas of the continent predicted to be so dry or average turned out REALLY REALLY WET. All in all – a waste of taxpayers money.
Maximum temperatures were correctly predicted in that same SE Qld-NE NSW zone where the rain Outlook had a win.
The West WA warmth was not predicted – a few points for the little win around Broome – then the predicted warmth in SA-Vic-Tas turned out to be non-existent – like the huge predicted hot patch across north Australia. Large areas of the continent centre were predicted average and warm but turned out anomalously cool to varying degrees – (added 4th Dec) – I would award a few points for the E-W trough shape in the Outlook which is partly copied by the two cool patches. IMHO – overall a pretty miserable and useless failure.
The Outlook for minimum temperatures (nights) suggest there must be a serious lack of reality in the BoM – how could you go with a model predicting such a hot result ? – in the face of months of failures. I think AGW has got to their collective judgment. Did nobody raise a hand to say that the real Australia was unlikely to have this extent and degree of hot nights ?
The wins in WA, SE Qld-E NSW, Top End and far nth Qld are outweighed by the negatives over the remaining large areas. I like the way the largest area with a 75% prediction to be above average – turned out to approximate the largest area of cool anomaly. (added 4th Dec) – note how in the minimum Outlook the contours have a broadly domed shape with the red hot peaks in the NT and Nth WA – while the actual weather results are exactly opposite with the major cool area representing a “topographic low” in the contouring. Another example of the BoM being EXACTLY wrong.
Can I remind readers of the peer reviewed paper from 2005;
“Verification and value of the Australian Bureau of Meteorology township seasonal rainfall forecasts in Australia, 1997-2005
AL Vizard, GA Anderson and DJ Buckley”
Then there is a 2008 paper looking at correlations with SOI
Looks like BOM have learnt their forecasting methods from the UK Met Office…or is it the other way round…
James Delingpole’s latest suggests a dead octopus would be better at forecasting than the Met Office…
Apparently this is the “3rd hottest year on record” & ol’ mate Jones is out spruiking it.
It is starting to get a “Hitler’s Bunker” like un-reality ( to me at least)
All n all – a waste of taxpayers money.
Wait until CSIRO/BOM move to dynamic forecasting, then we will have something to complain about. This will require Super Computing resources including purchase of UK Met Hadley Centre’s Computer Model. At the moment statistical forecasting is cheap, as the Parliamentary Report into Forecasting makes clear – just some old cogers with their HP 15c calculators!
Steve Goddard has a graph up of HadCRUT temperature anomalies up and it shows (as he says) 2010 is well behind 1998 and it would require a huge spike in temperatures to match 1998. All these people have left in their arsenal is disinformation stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2010/12/03/3-is-the-new-1/
Andrew Bolt’s blog has an article on the latest from David Jones
I suspect the Bureau’s Jones is too eager to see the warming
blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/
But, but, but, isn’t this just weather?? The important thing to remember is that the models are correct at longer term and we are all going to DIE!!
Yup, we are all going to die a lot sooner than any effect of increasing CO2, outside of plant fertilization, actually shows up!!
The BOM’s David Jones (he of the BOM that NZ is getting NIWA’s audit done by)
Reader Tony picks up another line of Jones suggesting that the weather is like a Rorschach blot to him that he always interprets as “warming!”:
blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/i_suspect_the_bureaus_jones_is_too_eager_to_see_the_warming/
From the quoted World Today transcript:
DAVID JONES: You know, the huge fires in Russia for example clearly have a climate change component to them.
Oh really? The following historical correspondence is a translation from the original Russian-language source (found via a comment at WUWT) which shows there is nothing new, or climate change related, about fires and droughts in Russia (apologies for length):
1298: There was a wholesale death of animals. In the same year there was a drought, and the woods and peat bogs burnt.
1364: Halfway through summer there was a complete smoke haze, the heat was dreadful, the forests, bogs and earth were burning, rivers dried up. The same thing happened the following year . . .
1431: following a blotting out of the sky, and pillars of fire, there was a drought – “the earth and the bogs smouldered, there was no clear sky for 6 weeks, nobody saw the sun, fishes, animals and birds died of the smoke.
1735: Empress Anna wrote to General Ushakov: “Andrei Ivanovich, here in St Petersburg it is so smoky that one cannot open the windows, and all because, just like last year, the forests are burning. We are surprised that no-one has thought about how to stem the fires, which are burning for the second year in a row”.
1831: Summer was unbearably hot, and as a consequence of numerous fires in the forests, there was a constant haze of smoke in the air, through which the sun appeared a red hot ball; the smell of burning was so strong, that it was difficult to breathe.
The years of 1839-1841 were known as the “hungry years”. In the spring of 1840, the spring sowings of corn disappeared in many places. From midway through April until the end of August not a drop of rain fell. From the beginning of summer the fields were covered with a dirty grey film of dust. All the plants wilted, dying from the heat and lack of water. It was extraordinarily hot and close, even though the sun, being covered in haze, shone very weakly through the haze of smoke. Here and there in various regions of Russia the forests and peat bogs were burning (the firest had begun already in 1839). there was a reddish haze, partially covering the sun, and there were dark, menacing clouds on the horizon. There was a choking stench of smoke which penetrated everywhere, even into houses where the windows remained closed.
1868: the weather was murderous. It rained once during the summer. There was a drought. The sun, like a red hot cinder, glowed through the clouds of smoke from the peat bogs. Near Peterhoff the forests and peat workings burnt, and troops dug trenches and flooded the subterranean fire. It was 40 centigrade in the open, and 28 in the shade.
1868: a prolonged drought in the northern regions was accompanied by devastating fires in various regions. Apart from the cities and villages affected by this catastrophe, the forests, peat workings and dried-up marshes were burning. In St Petersburg region smoke filled the city and its outlying districts for several weeks.
1875: While in western europe there is continual rain and they complain about the cold summer, here in Russia there is a terrible drought. In southern Russia all the cereal and fruit crops have died, and around St Petersburg the forest fires are such that in the city itself, especially in the evening, there is a thick haze of smoke and a smell of burning. Yesterday, the burning woods and peat bogs threatened the ammunitiion stores of the artillery range and even Okhtensk gunpowder factory.
1885: (in a letter from Peter Tchaikovsky, composer): I’m writing to you at three oclock in the afternoon in such darkness, you would think it was nine oclock at night. For several days, the horizon has been enveloped in a smoke haze, arising, they say, from fires in the forest and peat bogs. Visibility is diminishing by the day, and I’m starting to fear that we might even die of suffocation.
1917 (diary of Aleksandr Blok, poet): There is a smell of burning, as it seems, all around the city peat bogs, undergrowth and trees are burning. And no-one can extinguish it. That will be done only by rain and the winter. Yellowish-brown clouds of smoke envelope the villages, wide swaithes of undergrowth are burning, and God sends no rain, and what wheat there is in the fields is burning.
Great work again, Warwick.
I work in the Ozzie, Renewables sector and we put a considerable amount of time and effort into modeling primarily one variable – the future, spot price. We would never admit that we get it right, but it’s the best we can do and without it there would be no risk management.
The BOM, (super)-computers try to model a lot more than one variable. On top of a smattering of politically-driven, AGW, motives, it would be hard to predict long-term weather, I reckon. They seem to miss the next 12 hours here in Sydney a lot as well. Good luck with their predictions, it’s a tough task.
Floods, freeze not the end of global warming: CSIRO. Once more their ABC leads the chant – high temperatures mean climate change/global warming, cooler temperatures are just natural weather variability. So 2010 may or may not prove to be the warmest year in the last 100 years, why should that surprise. After all, wide spread temperature records started only about 100 years ago during a rising planetary temperature trend that commenced at the low point of the Little Ice Age about 300 years ago. Clearly that was long before man made CO2 emissions could have influenced planetary temperature.
Also problematic for the man made warming hypothesis, observational evidence has invalidated the warming projections of the gaggle of grants financed climate models including that of CSIRO. During the last 10 – 15 years there has been no statistically significant planetary warming (a point agreed by Professor Phil Jones of “Climategate” fame) while during that same period man made CO2 emissions have continued unabated?
Bob you might be interested in this wattsupwiththat.com/2010/12/25/do-we-care-if-2010-is-the-warmist-year-in-history/
it’s about the race between 1934 and 1998 to be the hottest for US annual mean temperature; it’s interesting because of the adjustments made by NASA (ski slope for 1934 and ski lift for 1998) which resulted in 1934 losing the race – bad luck for the old timer as the author says
Then there’s this wattsupwiththat.com/
2010 – where does it fit in the warmest year list?
(last paras)
So where do the 1934/1998/2010 warm years rank in the long-term list of warm years? Of the past 10,500 years, 9,100 were warmer than 1934/1998/2010. Thus, regardless of which year ( 1934, 1998, or 2010) turns out to be the warmest of the past century, that year will rank number 9,099 in the long-term list.
The climate has been warming slowly since the Little Ice Age (Fig. 5), but it has quite a ways to go yet before reaching the temperature levels that persisted for nearly all of the past 10,500 years.
It’s really much to do about nothing.
David Stockwell from Niche Modelling is in flood ravaged Qld; landshape.org/enm/
David’s latest article is on the floods in Emerald and it’s written today – he’s on the spot
the opening paras:
Right now I am in Emerald, Qld., Australia with choppers droning constantly overhead in the middle of a flood event, having spent the last few days bagging sand for friends’ houses. I have been through this a few times now, having grown up in country areas.
I want to document how poorly BoM modeling has served the community during this event. No flood risk was projected initially.
(and worryingly for BOM modelling predictions as he says):
The BoM predictions started at 3.5m at the spillway on the 27th, kept rising daily as the water rose, then paniced and overshot by 0.5m on the final day.
A known amount of rain fell on a known terrain. It can’t be that hard.
Des Moore has an article today on the BOM’s annual statement published on 5 January: Climate inquiry needed
climaterealists.com/index.php?id=6997
his conclusion
This latest display of highly questionable opinions and supposedly factual statements by “experts” strengthens the case for a proper independent inquiry.
Given the UK’s financial position, we may be able to get that Hadley Met Office
supercomputer quite cheap. The BOM can also pick up all the Met staff – there is a
danger they will be lynched if they remain in the UK.
Thats a deal likely to appeal to Wong, Garret, Gillard, Bob Brown etc
Especially after the Jan 12th, Brisbane flooding hitting the news, if you’re interested in BOM’s summer forecast (issued 17th December 2010) check this:
www.bom.gov.au/climate/ahead/archive/rainfall/20101217.shtml
“The chances of receiving above median rainfall during the January to March period are between 60 and 70% across the eastern half of NSW, southeastern Queensland and western WA.”
They finally recognise the effects of La Nina after the wet spring they didn’t predict.
Why didn’t Anna Bligh put Wivenhoe Dam back to long-term, normal levels, 75% (not leave it at a drought-threat level of 100%)?