Talk:Met Office

Weather stations

I recently created stubs at Penkridge weather station and Wye weather station, by lifting sections from articles about individual towns ; so that articles about may local towns can link to them. There's no mention in this article that the MO runs such stations, nor can I find a list of them. How many are there? Do they warrant a category to themselves? Can anyone help to fill out these articles, or create more, please? Or should we just list them her. or on a separate page, and have exeternal links to the data? Andy Mabbett 11:29, 16 June 2007 (UTC)

Supercomputers

Is the fact that the Met Office had the worlds third most powerful computer 13 years ago still significant today? I notice that the current computer is 325 times faster and yet it doesn't appear near the top of the supercomputer list.

94.193.93.109 (talk) 22:33, 1 February 2010 (UTC)

Hard winters

I have inserted more relevant text on the Met Office poor forecast of the hard winter of 2009/10. The replaced text was quite misleading. Peterlewis (talk) 18:31, 10 December 2010 (UTC)

No, the text you replaced perfectly explained probabilistic forecasting. What you have inserted in a common error of those who do not understand probabilities - that if you offer a less than 1 probability of an event happening and it doesn't that there is a mistake. TBH, this will confuse US Wikipedians where probabilistic forecasting is common, so the public are not ignorant of the meaning. Nuttah (talk) 18:37, 10 December 2010 (UTC)

The text used weasel words to excuse the failure of the Met Office to predict the hard winter, and you are trying the same trick. Are they going to explain why they made a wrong forecast? You are the one in error I think. Peterlewis (talk) 22:29, 10 December 2010 (UTC)

Probabilities are not right or wrong. Remember the games at the fair where you put a coin in at the top, it bounces of pegs on the way down and eventually ends up in a slot? The chance of landing in each slot has a probability, some more likely - some less likely. However, no end state is right or wrong - just a case of probability in action. This is basic GCSE maths. There were no weasel words, the Met Office probabilistic prediction was fine, it never said there would be a good winter - that was the media spin on the forecast. Nuttah (talk) 08:29, 11 December 2010 (UTC)

This not an argument about right or wrong. The problem arises from teh figure of 65% probability of a mild winter. This means that it is more likely than not that a mild winter would occur. That was a misleading probability since we did in fact have a hard winter. So how did the Met office arrive at such a figure? Can we place any credibility in such figures produced by the Met Office at all? Peterlewis (talk) 08:33, 11 December 2010 (UTC)