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.

Comments

Re:No it can't

[michelcolman]

Hey, but 62% accuracy... that's 12% better than me!

Re:No it can't

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Why? Predicting the winter weather in Britain is pretty simple. This little program will get it right about 90% of the time:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <time.h>
#include <unistd.h>

int main()
{
char date[32];
time_t rawtime;

time (&rawtime);
struct tm *timeinfo = localtime (&rawtime);
strftime(date, sizeof(date)-1, "%d.%m.%y_%H:%M:%S", timeinfo);

printf("[%s] Weather prediction: Precipitation\n", date);
sleep(86400);
}