Saturday, February 16, 2008

Corbyn on February

Well I promised a post on his Feb forecast, so I suppose I ought to do something about it. Sorry for the delay, which was caused by an intrusion of real life. Even though there is nothing quite so exciting to discuss, I can't retrospectively change my mind without running the risk of being accused of the same cherry-picking that Corbyn excels at, so here goes...

In summary, Feb is supposed to be mild and generally wet. The predicted temperature anomaly of +0.7-1.7C (over the central England region) is using 1961-1990 as the baseline, which has a mean of 3.8C, so anything from 4.5-5.5C would do. Up to now it's averaged about 5.8C and the forecast is for more mild weather. I don't think I'm sticking my neck out too far in saying that there is a strong probability the month will end up warmer than his forecast. On precip he is predicting anything from 120% to 200% - mild winter weather is generally wet, but it's looking extremely dry so far so there is some catching up to do.

On the details, of course there are lots of random weather predictions that have not/will not come to pass. Remember the "severe gales" on the 7th? Nope, me neither. There are supposed to be some more happening right now, and they will return on the 21st, with the current ones "notably stormy with damaging winds espec 14th-16th in West" and the latter "High tides on new moon around 21 with heavy seas from sev gales threaten sea defences in W & S/W". We will see. I assume at least the forecast of a high tide is sound, as I used to work at the institute that generates them :-) The Scotland-France rugby match at the start of the month was "likely off" due to frost and snow, but unfortunately the French didn't read that - maybe the Scots did, cos they didn't seem to turn up for the match! His best effort so far is probably the snow at the start of the month - but he explicitly forecast Friday 1st to be dry, with the snow arriving over the weekend. Sadly for those who were trying to beat the arrival of the bad weather, it caught them on the Friday afternoon, within hours of him releasing his forecast. I wonder whether he will claim this as a hit or not.

Overall, it doesn't look good for him.

1 comment:

Brian said...

Corbyn might be on to something with the claimed link between the moon and the tides. We'll just have to see how well that prediction bears out.