Slashdot Mirror
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
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.
it's not much more than a coin-toss, though.
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?
named 'Glendower?'
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
62% accuracy is now the new 95%.
Is this part of the "everyone wins" generation come to life in practical science now? lel
It's good for the NAO. When you're pushing the boundaries, anything over 50% is good.
For long-term climate models, things like the NAO average out across many years. For short-term weather forecasting, you have a week or more before the system diverges enough to cease to be useful. But it's tougher working on those in-between scales.
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
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.
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.
I can somewhat attest to that - having lived in the UK from 2004 to 2009... In 2008 I tried taking some photos from our offices in Canary Wharf. I looked at the whether forecast every day before deciding whether to take camera+lenses+tripod to work that day. ...and for many of those days, the "visibility" forecast of the MET was pretty much the opposite of what happened -- hardly any visibility on days when it said "good" visibility -- and clear views on many days where the forecast was for poor visibility. In the end, I lugged the stuff around most days, waiting for days of good whether with low winds (no access to balcony if winds were more than 10 miles per hour (average)...
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?
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.
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.
When you're pushing the boundaries, anything over 50% is good.
Is it? It depends on the data, the model, the thresholds for "correct forecast," etc. There are lots of places in the world where a "persistence" forecast (i.e., today will be the same as yesterday) will net you a greater than 50% accuracy within a reasonable margin of error. And one should also always consider forecasting models against general predicted climate averages. Again, taking those into account, a forecast system just using climate averages might do pretty well too.
It really depends on what the percentage "accuracy" means in this case and how it was measured. I'm guessing they wouldn't bother reporting it if it weren't significant, but just how significant is difficult to tell without the details (and it seems the full research paper is behind a paywall).
Otherwise citing a number like "62% accuracy" is utterly meaningless. If you had a task like, "Guess how tall the next person to walk into the building will be," and I achieved 62% accuracy, that could be remarkable and improbable if the margin of error was 1/8 of an inch. But if I instead was guessing "Taller than 1 foot or shorter than 1 foot," then 62% accuracy might mean I'm mentally retarded.
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.
Basically, it's the same forecast you'd get if you sat down with a bunch of weather records and chose the average weather for any given day based on them. i.e. yes, there's a greater chance it'll rain in April than December. 62% is laughable.
What have bishops got to do with it?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
You're talking about overfitting.
The thing is they aren't doing that regression-and- frigging-the-coefficients thing. It's a physics based, bottom up, method.
Nice armchair.
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?
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
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.
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.