Met Office advice was 'not helpful'

28 March 2013 Last updated at 21:07 ETBy Roger Harrabin Environment analyst

Between March and April 2012, the UK experienced an extraordinary shift in pressure and downpours

The Met Office has admitted issuing advice to government that was "not helpful" during last year's remarkable switch in weather patterns.

Between March and April 2012, the UK experienced an extraordinary shift from high pressure and drought to low pressure and downpours.

But the Met Office said the forecast for average rainfall "slightly" favoured drier than average conditions.

The three-month forecast is said to be experimental.

It is sent to contingency planners but has been withheld from the public since the Met Office was pilloried for its "barbecue summer" forecast.

Last spring's forecast has been obtained by BBC News under Freedom of Information.

The Met Office three-monthly outlook at the end of March stated: "The forecast for average UK rainfall slightly favours drier than average conditions for April-May-June, and slightly favours April being the driest of the three months."

A soul-searching Met Office analysis later confessed: "Given that April was the wettest since detailed records began in 1910 and the April-May-June quarter was also the wettest, this advice was not helpful."

In a note to the government chief scientist, the Met Office chief scientist Julia Slingo explains the difficulty of constructing long-distance forecasts, given the UK's position at the far edge of dominant world weather systems.

She says last year's calculations were not actually wrong because they were probabilistic.

The Met Office forecast that the probability that April-May-June would fall into the driest of five categories was 20-25%, whilst the probability it would fall into the wettest was 10-15% (The average probability would be 20%).

The Met Office explained it this way: "The probabilistic forecast can be considered as somewhat like a form guide for a horse race.

"It provides an insight into which outcomes are most likely, although in some cases there is a broad spread of outcomes, analogous to a race in which there is no strong favourite. Just as any of the horses in the race could win the race, any of the outcomes could occur, but some are more likely than others."

It said: "The creation of the three monthly outlook relies upon the fact that weather is influenced by the slow variation of ocean conditions (and other processes) which can be predicted months in advance.

"Whilst there is a very strong dependence of tropical weather on processes such as El Nino ,the UK's weather is dominated by the highly variable atmospheric circulation over the North Atlantic, making it much harder to what will happen weeks and months ahead."

In the case of last spring, Dr Slingo says the forecast may have been pushed awry by a little-understood climate phenomenon, the Madden Julian Oscillation (MJO) - a pattern of thunderstorms that starts in the Indian Ocean. The Met Office calls it "one of the great unsolved challenges of tropical meteorology".

The irregular phenomenon is an envelope of thunderstorms starting in the Indian Ocean and moving into the Pacific. The MJO concentrates tropical rainfall within the envelope, with blue skies around it.

Nick Klingaman from Reading University says that, as it moves east, the MJO influences monsoon rainfall in Australia, India, Southeast Asia, South America and Africa.

These "bursts" and "breaks" in the monsoon cause floods and droughts that impact agriculture, river systems and infrastructure. The "long arm of the MJO" even extends into the middle latitudes.

"The thunderstorm activity generates waves in the atmosphere that move toward the poles," he told me. "The position of the MJO today has been shown to influence the position of the Pacific and Atlantic jet streams 10-15 days later."

He says the MJO can be an important predictor of the state of the North Atlantic Oscillation - which controls much of our weather in the UK - about 2-4 weeks in advance.

And that's how a thunderstorm off the coast of India might trigger a pattern of events which led to the weather switch last spring.

Some weather models can predict the MJO three weeks ahead, he said, but others struggle to predict it a week ahead.

Forecasts have greater skill when the MJO is already active. Reading University is working with the Met Office on improving MJO forecasting, he said.

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Papers seek legal advice on watchdog

19 March 2013 Last updated at 01:24 ET

Papers are currently self-regulated voluntarily through the Press Complaints Commission

Continue reading the main story

• Q&A: Press regulation deal
• Reaction to regulation deal
• Beneath the skin of the Leveson law
• Robinson: Why the deal was done

A number of national newspapers are taking "high-level legal advice" about whether to co-operate with a new press watchdog established by royal charter and backed by legislation.

While the Independent welcomes the move, most papers are hostile and are holding back on making a decision.

They complain they were not represented in a meeting on Sunday night at which the three main parties struck a deal.

Press reform campaign group Hacked Off, meanwhile, had four members there.

Party leaders said the independent regulator - with powers to demand upfront apologies from UK publishers and impose £1m fines - would protect victims of press intrusion and preserve press freedom.

It will replace the current system, in which the press is self-regulated voluntarily through the Press Complaints Commission (PCC).

The deal follows Lord Justice Leveson's inquiry into press ethics which called for a new independent press watchdog, backed by legislation to ensure it was it was doing its job properly.

The inquiry found that journalists had hacked thousands of phones.

A joint statement from Daily Mail publisher Associated Newspapers, The Sun and Times publisher News International, the Daily Star and Daily Express publisher Northern & Shell, and the Telegraph Media Group said they would wait to decide if they would join the new regulator after consulting lawyers.

"No representative of the newspaper and magazine industry had any involvement in, or indeed any knowledge of, the cross-party talks on press regulation that took place on Sunday night.

"We have only late this afternoon [Monday] seen the royal charter that the political parties have agreed between themselves and, more pertinently, the recognition criteria, early drafts of which contained several deeply contentious issues which have not yet been resolved with the industry."

On Tuesday, the Times said in its editorial it had been "a bleak episode in the story of freedom of the press in Britain" and that "the principle that a free press not subject to Parliamentary statute has been conceded".

The Newspaper Society, representing local papers, said the proposals agreed by the three parties would place "a crippling burden on the UK's 1,100 local newspapers, inhibiting freedom of speech and the freedom to publish".

That was, in part, because of the "huge financial penalties for newspapers which choose to be outside the system and an arbitration service which would open the floodgates to compensation claimants", president Adrian Jeakings said.

But Chris Blackwood, editor of the Independent, told BBC News: "We don't think it's too bad - it could have been a lot worse."

He added: "I think we have to recognise the mess the industry got into. I mean, the industry did some very bad things and our existing regulator just wasn't up to the task."

The 57-nation Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), meanwhile, warned that "a government-established regulatory body, regardless of how independent it is intended to be, could pose a threat to media freedom".

Prime Minister David Cameron said the Conservatives, Liberal Democrats and Labour had agreed on a new system of "tough independent self-regulation that will deliver for victims and meet the principles set out in (Leveson's) report".

He said a new system would ensure:

• upfront apologies from the press to victims
• fines of 1% of turnover for publishers, up to £1m
• a self-regulatory body with independent appointments and funding
• a robust standards code
• a free arbitration service for victims
• a speedy complaints system

The charter defines publishers as newspapers, magazines or websites containing news-related material.

But there remains confusion about moves to extend the new regulation to the internet, with Downing Street conceding it is not clear exactly which websites would be covered under the new rules.

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