Government winter weather forecasts botched again

Super computers can be great machines, but their use by NOAA in the U.S. and by the British Met Office demonstrate the old saying “garbage in – garbage out.”

Weather and climate are complex. Even with supercomputers, if the wrong assumptions are input, then the results are often wrong. Let’s see how NOAA and the Met Office did with winter forecasts this year.

The graphic below was made last fall by NOAA showing their predictions for winter temperatures in the U.S. The orange with an “A” shows areas that NOAA predicted would be above average, the blue with a “B” is for below normal temperatures, and the white area with “EC” are equal changes of being above or below normal.

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