Thursday, March 13, 2008

Corbyn on March

I've got hold of Piers Corbyn's forecast for March. He predicts that it will be cold, very wet and slightly cloudier than average. According to Philip Eden, he's wrong on all counts at the moment.

The (in?)famous Wheeler paper specifically focussed on gales, and there was of course a severe storm a few days ago across much of the UK. So it's interesting to see what Piers predicted for that interval:
Cold with fog and frost. Some wintry showers. Wind: light/mod.
The Calcutta Cup match was supposed to be "Prob dry. 10% risk of shower."

Oh well, there's always next week to look forward to, for which he forecasts.
18-21 Mar (85%) Very wet & windy, thunder and local floods. Gales.

4 comments:

P. Lewis said...

Oh, let's be fair to Piers. On the same day, ~200 miles westish and a couple of hours earlier, he was near enough spot on as Wales walloped the Irish with but 14 men for a quarter of the game.

OK, let's not be fair ... perhaps walloped is too strong a word.

Afternoon tea in the garden with the family on Good Friday looks a no-no then.

So much for lamb and lion, if PC is correct ;-)

skanky said...

There have been *two* severe storms crossing the UK since Sunday. Seeing as he's used high gusts on remote Scottish islands to justify "storm of the century" forecasts before, I wonder how he explains large areas of lowland Britain experiencing 50+mph gusts and 30-45mph average wind speeds at a time that he's forecast light/mod winds?

P. Lewis said...

I realise I didn't quite write what I meant in the first post:

"On the same day, ~200 miles westish and a couple of hours earlier, he was near enough spot on as Wales walloped the Irish with but 14 men for a quarter of the game."

This should have read:

On the same day, ~200 miles westish and a couple of hours earlier, he would have been near enough spot on with that forecast as Wales walloped the Irish with but 14 men for a quarter of the game.

Hope that expresses my drift a little better.

[sarcasm on]After all, what's 200 miles and a couple of hours when you're forecasting for an area of about 116,000 sq miles for the British Isles and a month or more ahead.[sarcasm off]

Did he give a forecast for the Triple Crown match BTW?

James Annan said...

Eng v Ire is "Cloudy risk rain."
Wales v France is "Cloudy rain likely." Those predictions must be rather a safe bet for much of the year, especially when there are no probabilities attached...