The Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) carries on with the seemingly impossible task of every month predicting the odds of exceeding median temperatures, both day and night, plus the odds of exceeding median rainfall for the next three months. Results for the temperature Outlooks July to September have been as bad as I can recall. Actual temperatures turned out often to be the reverse of what was forecast.
It is high time the Federal Govt told the BoM to cease this waste of taxpayers money publishing the Outlooks, wasting taxpayers money for over a decade. Set the staff involved to more productive work for Australia or fire them – simple.
Prediction of the odds of exceeding median maximum (day-time) temperatures –
Actual weather result in anomalies – hot where it should have been cool centrally and nearer average around the coast and Tasmania where it should have been very hot.
Prediction of the odds of exceeding median minimum (night-time) temperatures –
Actual weather result in anomalies – hot where it should have been cool or average centrally and nearer average around the coast, even cool anomalies in the north, then Tasmania where it was above average but should have been hotter.
Temperature Outlooks here – make maps of recent actual temperatures here
You can check rainfall Outlook and actual rainfall for yourself.
And they get paid to write stuff like this.
For the parts mentioned, is the outlook accuracy better, worse, good, poor or what? And what do these terms mean anyway? Does moderate accuracy mean as good as a coin toss?, because I strongly suspect it does.
Yep, fire them.
It’s really quite simple. Whatever they say is going to happen, assume the exact opposite and you will come very close to the truth. The same applies to their statements CO2 emissions and Global temperatures.
Warwick, FYI
Solid rains help Australia’s irrigators
www.news.com.au/breaking-news/national/solid-rains-help-australias-irrigators/story-e6frfku9-1226732248198
From the ABS, which I’ve noticed is non-alarmist.
How is that “no rains” increasing droughts going?
Please stop raining
Many Tasmanian farmers in the north and north west of the state say the sustained period of rain is the worst they’ve seen in memory.
Warwick,
Good on you for keeping their feet to the fire on this. I reckon quite a few BoM staff are quietly enjoying your exposures. They are mostly serious people and must know that the seasonal forecasts are rubbish, and be disgusted themselves that their organization is still putting them out, when their only likely result is to damage our economy by misleading farmers and graziers.
When you have raised this issue before, some critics have pointed out that the predictions are in a different format from the outcomes. That’s true enough: the predictions are percentage changes of exceeding the average, whereas the outcomes are degrees above or below the average. But this doesn’t dispose of the issue, for two reasons.
First, why doesn’t the BoM put out actual temperature anomaly forecasts? They can surely derive these from their climate models and actual temperatures – if they were reliable – would be of much more use than a statistical probability of being above or below the average. To take an example, if the BoM says there is more than an 80% chance of warmer than usual weather, farmers are going to bet on unusual heat. If the temps turn out 0.1 degrees warmer than average, then the BoM was technically right, but the farmers will feel gyped.
Second, despite the different formats, you can still see exactly where the BoM was right or wrong. If they predicted warmer than usual and it was cooler than usual (by whatever margin) then they were wrong. And this particular month’s example is a shocker. More than 50% of the continent was predicted to be cooler than usual – virtually all the interior more than 100 miles from the coast, plus the whole eastern seabord from Townsville to Eden. Yet practically this entire area turned out not just warm but more than 2 degrees warmer than usual. Any cockie in this area who relied on the BoM for a serious farming decision over this period would be ropeable.
Now as it turned out practically the entire continent was warmer than usual, but even in the minority of areas where the BoM predicted this, the farmers were ill-served by the predictions. Only Tasmania and small slivers of the NT, Cape York and southwest WA had high enough probabilities of warm weather for you to want to bank on it, and these were just the areas where the temperatures were closest to normal.
I wonder how much longer the BoM will persist with this farce. I know they have all sorts of caveats and disclaimers around these predictions, but it’s only a matter of time before someone who has been led up the garden path once too often sues them and, even if he or she loses, the utter futility of the BoM predictions will be exposed in court.
Thanks David – last week I faxed the following to the BoM Director with cc to Minister for the Environment.
3rd October 2013
Dear Director,
I have just commented online on the failure of your latest temperature Outlooks.
BoM 3 month Australian climate prediction Outlooks July to September 2013 – mostly exactly wrong again
www.warwickhughes.com/blog/?p=2385
I am not the only taxpayer who is sick and tired of the BoM wasting scarce Government resources on these useless Outlooks.
I look forward one day to hearing that the BoM has ceased producing three month Outlooks and staff involved can be redirected to more useful roles. Such as progressing the digitizing of daily temperature data.
Many thanks, etc