Forecast failure: how the Met Office lost touch with reality

It has been a glorious sunny week in Britain — it feels as if summer is finally here. As Andy Murray was winning Wimbledon, temperatures on Centre Court exceeded 40˚C in the sun. Northern Ireland has been hotter than Cancun. The papers have begun their annual drip-feed of stories about ‘tombstoning’ — young people throwing themselves from cliffs and bridges into water. It is hard to believe that it was just a few weeks ago that the Met Office braced us for a ‘colder-than-average’ July and a decade of soggy summers. Not so hard to believe that they held a crisis meeting recently, to discuss why they have got the weather so wrong for so long.

Only this week has Britain had a small taste of the kind of temperatures the Met Office has been promising for over a decade. In September 2008, it forecast a trend of mild winters: the following winter turned out to be the coldest for a decade.