The British Meteorological Office (the MET Office) has been in the news recently and not in a good light.
They have been constant in their erroneous weather predictions for the last ten out of ten years.
From the UK Independent (03/20/2000): Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past
The London Times (12/01/2005): Britain faces big freeze as Gulf Stream loses strength
The Daily Mail (03/24/2010): National Trust campaign highlights how gardens will look if global warming brings Mediterranean weather to Britain
Well, add this egg-on-face to the Met Office's long string of career successes -- from the UK Daily Telegraph:
Volcanic ash cloud: Met Office blamed for unnecessary six-day closure
The government agency was accused of using a scientific model based on "probability" rather than fact to forecast the spread of the volcanic ash cloud that made Europe a no-fly zone and ruined the plans of more than 2.5 million travellers in and out of Britain.
A senior European official said there was no clear scientific evidence behind the model, which air traffic control services used to justify the unprecedented shutdown.
Eleven major British airlines joined forces last night to publicly criticise Nats, the air traffic control centre, over the way it interpreted the Met Office's "very limited empirical data".
The MET Office's problem is that they luuuves their computer models and they don't ever bother to stick their heads outside the window to see what is actually happening. There are aircraft that have been specially hardened to fly through all kinds of debris and ash (we use them to fly through hurricanes) and the MET Office could have sent one of theirs or borrowed one of ours and gotten some real world numbers but noooooo... They stayed indoors and played with their fancy new (and polluting) supercomputer. From the UK Telegraph:
The Met Office super computer by numbers
Here is a rundown of the Met Office super computer by numbers:
:: The £30 million computer -- more powerful than 100,000 standard PCs -- was installed in the Met Office's new £80 million headquarters in May.
:: It is capable of 1,000 billion calculations every second to feed data to 400 scientists.
:: The computer uses 1.2 megawatts of energy to run -- enough to power a small town.
:: In terms of pollution the computer produces 12,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide every year.
:: This makes the Met Office building one of the most polluting public buildings in the UK as 75 per cent of its carbon footprint is produced by the super computer.
Talk about "blinded me with Science".
