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A British Supercomputer Can Predict Winter Weather a Year In Advance (thestack.com)
The national weather service of the U.K. claims it can now predict the weather up to a year in advance.
An anonymous reader quotes The Stack: The development has been made possible thanks to supercomputer technology granted by the UK Government in 2014. The £97 million high-performance computing facility has allowed researchers to increase the resolution of climate models and to test the retrospective skill of forecasts over a 35-year period starting from 1980... The forecasters claim that new supercomputer-powered techniques have helped them develop a system to accurately predict North Atlantic Oscillation -- the climatic phenomenon which heavily impacts winters in the U.K.
The researchers apparently tested their supercomputer on 36 years worth of data, and reported proudly that they could predict winter weather a year in advance -- with 62% accuracy.
The researchers apparently tested their supercomputer on 36 years worth of data, and reported proudly that they could predict winter weather a year in advance -- with 62% accuracy.
I call BS on the headline. Let the damn thing prove it can do it before we claim it can. And doing regression model tweaking doesn't prove anything.
using historical data, that's just as silly as "cooking the books". There is one and only one way to test the validity of such a system, and that will take over a year....
It is predicting climate, not weather.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
Being able to predict a coin toss with 50% accuracy provides 0 information content.
Also, its England. It will rain is likely going to be 80% accurate on any day. Change that a bit with the seasons and bang.
The system recognizes the data it has been trained with. Or you split your data set into two, train with one half, predict with the other. So far, so good, so reasonable. Now results aren't all that good, so you change algorithms, parameters, try again. Which is again matching the existing data, just in a more manual way.
And with human-made climate change, predicting the past is not even overly helpful since the weather is going where records never were.
If the Brits wanted their weather predicted for the past 30 years, I'd have done it for only 50 million pounds. I think they got a bit ripped off.
66% of the days in London contain some form of precipitation. So, I predict rain every day. I'm right 66% of the time. Wow, I'm smarter than a supercomputer!
Or just ask an indian. When asked how he could tell how cold the winters would be, one old chief just said, "I watch how much firewood the white man splits."
Have gnu, will travel.
its going to rain
Losing context to sensationalism since the mid-1890s! or 1895 -- with 62% accuracy.
62% the weather will have some general trend that winter. Better than nothing but don't tell the public yet. They will just think they are smarter than supercomputers.
I predict next winter is going to be...
Bloody Rubbish
Captcha: climates... go figure.
because "The skill increases greatly with ensemble size due to a spuriously small signal-to-noise ratio in the model" (from tfa)
I've been living in the UK for the last three years an as I use a telescope I look at the weather daily. The national weather service barely gets a prediction correct FOR THE SAME NIGHT never mind days or years in advance! I am not kidding, there is something like an 80% or a bit more chance for clouds and a lower chance for precipitation, but the forecast only gives you slightly more information than that. Eg instead of 80/20 cloud odds, if the MET office thinks it will be cloudless, consider the odds to be something like 60/40 instead. The forecast for the next night is even less useful.
For example, 2 days ago it was telling me there was a zero chance of rain and the clouds would be gone within the hour. I took my scope out and had to drag it back in due to the zero chance rain that was dropping (perhaps the heart of gold was using the improbability drive?). If it wasn't clear, this was the within the next hour prediction, I.e. Weather practically right now...
If they could actually predict UK weather with any accuracy short term That would be a start. Now for 1 year later a forecast of "cloudy with a 50% chance of precipitation" would be correct most of the time, yet I would not call it a forecast.
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
it's not much more than a coin-toss, though.
So can i!
This is only impressive if they didn't use any historical data at all to create the new super computer. If they did use historical data then the answer would be correct by definition. The way to test this is to use historical data make a prediction and then wait a year then compare to the real data only then you have any valid comparison.
Predict the weather next week?
Little better than random chance, then.
Pisses me off that the biggest IT investments and supercomputers exist for meteorogical purposes that perform little better than chance.
Though important, for shipping, air travel, etc. it's not THAT important to get a tiny little percentage over just looking around and thinking it's going to piss down in a moment, or sticking a box in the North that lets you guess how long until the same weather hits the South.
Just seems one enormous waste of money to me. And who exactly PAYS for their weather forecasts? Are airlines really paying millions of pounds a year to find out if the skies are going to be a bit rough?
we knew that before
on a different note, my winter predictions have been shown to be 100% correct for all of northern Europe:
I predict that the average temperature in winter is colder than the average temperature in summer. I promise I only use past data and I learnt it from more than 40 years of studying weather patterns.
named 'Glendower?'
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
All models are wrong.
Some models are useful.
62% accuracy is now the new 95%.
Is this part of the "everyone wins" generation come to life in practical science now? lel
can it or can it not predict, say, numberwang?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Good people go to bed earlier.
to predict British weather.
Arnold in one of his textbooxs demonstrated that, to make a weather prediction one month in advance, you need to measure pressure, temperature, wind speed and humidity with at least five significative decimals. He used sound mathematical methods based upon a theorem by Poincaré. With all the respect for technical skills and competence of people at Met Office, I trust more what Arnold demonstrated using nothing but paper and pencil. Good math is never overcome by brute force computation.
Woohoo?
I predict that the temperatures in London, England, will be lower in December, 2018 than the temperature in July, 2018.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
... and also impacts winters in the northeast USA.
Tired of all these ridiculous claims.
A British Supercomputer Can Predict Winter Weather a Year In Advance
Yeah, so can I: cold, with occasional snow and sleet.
-- sudon't
Air-ride Equipped
It says: The weather will get better or worse or it will stay as it is.
I live in MN.
I can predict "winter weather" - whatever the hell that means, precisely - to the same degree of accuracy 10 YEARS in advance.
"In 2026, we will see 'winter weather' in Nov, Dec, Jan, Feb and well into March".
If at least 2/3 of the years follow the normal weather patterns, I've just beaten their supercomputer.
-Styopa
... but does it run Linux?
Why UNIX?
Heck, anyone with half a brain can predict winter weather in the UK ten years in advance if they wanted.
"It will be overcast, and rainy throughout the day"
Will result in about 70% accuracy for a prediction for most any winter day there.
Better than random odds.
Wow. The reporting in this is just CRAP. I didn't read the scientific paper but the abstract (summary) and even the anouncement from the MET (both of which u can only find by first browsing to the link in the summary) makes it clear they are talking about CLIMATE not weather. And it's only about 1 major phenomenon that has a heavy influence on UK climate.
So this isn't about predicting the daily weather but rather general predictions about whether or not there will be general periods of "wet, stormy and warmer" vs "cold and dry". OK that may be helpful from a "general outlook" point of view, and nothing wrong with that.
It's the reporting on this though that is real CRAP as it makes it sound like the MET is saying they can tell you what the actual daily weather (temp, amount of precip, wind strength and direction etc.) will be.
Don't blame the MET for this blame the asshole reporter that has no clue about what he/she is writing about or is simply using click-bait reporting techniques to sensationalized the article.
The Slashdot editors perpetuate this by incorrectly summarizing the "news wothiness" of the article. The news worthiness or "summary" here should have been something like "News article sensationalizes report from the MET on climate predictions. Purposely confuses weather with climate." or some such thing.
And why even link to the sensationalized article rather than the MET's posted article itself? Just because some idiot Slashdot poster sent the link to the sensationalized reporting? Seriously the MET posted a relevant article summarizing the results of the scientific paper in a manner easily consumable by lay people (eg. you don't need to read the scientific paper in depth to get the gyst of what it says). Summarizing the MET article with a link to it would have been FAR more helpful and correct. It's one thing if the only article "reporting" on the paper appears on some website that did interviews with the scientists and summarized the interviews, it's just "click bait" to link to an article that simply references an actual article posted by the MET and in doing so gets it ENTIRELY wrong. That's not reporting that's sensationalism.
Because the local weather guys here can't even reliably predict tomorrows weather.
62% of what? Days when it was "correct". If so, what does "correct" mean? That it rained at 3pm? Between 3pm and 5pm? That there was 10mm of rain in that period? What if there was 10.4mm or 10.6mm?
If nothing else, a good demonstration of the popularity of Python when C is overkill
This is the UK. More like Monty Python.
I can predict TWO years in advance. Example: in 2018 on Xmas, it will rain in Glasgow.
See there's my prediction. Accurate? Oh that's something else.
...they were talking about, they'd simply invest their money and continually grow a fortune instead of taking piecemeal commissions.
Predicting the severity of a given winter is predicting climate. Predicting tomorrow's snowfall is weather. The North Atlantic oscillation which they're predicting is climate, not weather.
My predictions about the weather in Antarctica have been 100% correct.
What was the name of the Operating System and what kind of hardware did this supercomputer run on?
And you would know, being so obviously well-informed about weather simulations.
If the person who wrote the summary knew anything about "weather simulations" they would be aware that climate is not weather!!!
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
I predict it is 100% inaccurate.
This is just plain bollocks. Its inaccurate forecasting now goes out to a year, whereas before they'd stop the inaccurate forecast after a few weeks. This is simple institutional bullshit publicity campaign to justify the £250,000,000 a year the British government gives this ridiculous organisation.
They lose to the Farmer's Almanac.
That's a pretty interesting way of contextualising this. I must admit my first reaction to the summary was , hey 12% better than a coin toss, it'll take forever to actually prove that they are not just matching coin toss. But I agree, if I could walk into a casino and play roulette, red vs black, I'd make money very rapidly if I had an edge like that.
But, that relies on being able to make a large number of plays. They get one play per year.
ishmaelflood
What have bishops got to do with it?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
So somehow they are miraculously going from not being able to accurately predict a week in advance to being able to do a year? So how did they solve the current problem that makes it so unpredictable of not having sufficient information points from various areas of the world that severely affect weather long term? Is this super computer an amazing guesser or have they deployed 10's of thousands of weather stations around the world to gather that missing data?
Now they can get ahead on being wrong by a year!
62% accuracy is only a bit better than a coinflip. you will relatively often see it predict incorrectly 5 years in a row.
SURELY NOT!!!!!
Bollocks on their predication rate. Real forecasters report skill. By contrast, actual progress on predicting the North Atlantic Oscillation, perhaps an achievable goal, would be huge.
Both of these issues are covered in Judith Curry on Climate Change, a podcast from 2013 which, as it happens, I consumed yesterday.
Concerning the rush to embarrass themselves by reporting their weather prediction rate, it's because of the taxonomic land grab.
Note that the word "useful" as I chose to hear it, is entirely confined to the domain of career advancement and the writing of committee-room position papers.
Two things about Russ.
One is that he doesn't connect as much as he should. He's (since) done other podcasts which talk about how the regional nature of congressional representation makes politics in America intensely regional. This is
A prediction is a prediction, even if its on gray paper.
The headline is completely wrong. They can predict the NAO with much more accuracy, and as that has such a big effect on the winter weather in the UK, that lets them say (with only 62% accuracy) whether it'll be mild winter or a cold one. That's all. They can NOT, of course, predict the weather anything like that in advance. They didn't claim to, either - lazy new editors and "journalists" have mangled it into the bullshit we read here.
Find out of the Met Office officially claimed it before you start whining that the Met Office or their employees are lying sacks of crap, OK?
And that "one" is one that was not the consensus prediction and the actual text of the prediction contained many counterfactors that they predicted would invalidate the outcome if they changed (and they did change).
Meanwhile, how well have your fellow "skeptics" predictions panned out???
Michel, if you are disappointed then try my own algorithm : "weather tomorrow will be the same as today" -I guarantee the accuracy is higher than 50%.
We are running just behind them indeed -maybe they have a similar predictor!
Herve S.
Since the Brexit that's easy. Winter is coming, UK.
That's great they can predict weather a year out, but I doubt I'll remember the forecasts in a year. When will they be able to predict tomorrow's weather?