With compliments to Bishop Hill.  While many of us await a reply to FOI requests sent to the Cabinet Office and the Met Office, Bishop Hill wrote to the Quarmby audit team to see if they had actually received a copy of the Met Office’s cold-winter forecast.

The Quarmby team have responded to Bishop Hill and have helpfully provided a copy of the forecast, reproduced below.  Fill your boots playing with the statistics…

Met Office Initial Assessment of Risk for Winter 2010/11

This covers the months of November, December and January 2010/11, this will be updated monthly through the winter and so probabilities will change.

Temperature

3 in 10 chance of a mild start

3 in 10 chance of an average start

4 in 10 chance of a cold start

Precipitation

3 in 10 chance of a wet start

3 in 10 chance of an average start

4 in 10 chance of a dry start

Summary: There is an increased risk for a cold and wintry start to the winter season.

Looking further ahead beyond this assessment there are some indications of an increased risk of a mild end to the winter season.

What stands out from this forecast is that nowhere does the Met Office say we were ‘likely to face an extremely cold winter‘, which is the line that was spun by the BBC’s Roger Harrabin on behalf of the Met Office.

The forecast above is a classic ‘hedge your bets’ effort that tallies with this Government answer to a parliamentary question about the forecast:

Francis Maude: The Met Office provide the Government with regular updates throughout the year to inform short, medium and longer term planning. In late October, the Met Office advised that temperatures during November and December were likely to be average or colder. This information was shared with Departments as part of a wider review of winter preparedness.

(My emphasis in the quote above).  The Met Office is not coming out of this at all well and their attempts at spin are backfiring badly.

Autonomous Mind, 21 January 2011

For Background, see:

Met Office knew big freeze was coming but hushed it up

The Met Office And Its Seasonal Problems

Did UK Government Keep Cold Winter Warning Secret In Run-Up To UN Climate Conference?

Louise Ellman Asked To Probe Met Office’s ‘Conflicting’ Winter Weather Advice