Thursday, April 03, 2008

Corbyn's April forecast

Looks like the fun is set to continue for a little while longer, cos I've got Corbyn's April forecast. He thinks that April will be cool and rainy. This month he has unhelpfully split the Central England Temperature region into no fewer than three sections, so I'll make an estimate of the average: the SE chunk is predicted to be from -0.5 to +0.5C, the western chunk is -1 to 0C and a northern wedge is -0.8 to 0.2C - all values compared to the 1961-90 mean which is 7.89C for the CET series. So I'll take the overall average of that to be -0.75 to +0.25C and anything in that range (7.14 - 8.14C) will be a win for him. Rainfall is a little simpler, his forecast is 110-140% for the west and 95-130% for the east and north, so I'll allow 100-135% to count as a win.

As for notable events, the Grand National (5th) will be warm and dry, and the London Marathon (13th) will be positively warm or even hot. The Met Office disagrees on both counts (well they suggest the LM may be OK-ish), but what do they know?

2 comments:

P. Lewis said...

The climate-uk site helpfully splits the country into regions.

Did PC give a Grand National race-winner prediction? If he did, then I can decrease my odds of losing a stake by avoiding his prediction.

James Annan said...

Yebbut I don't want to get sucked into the bottomless pit of making ever more and more detailed comparisons. I could do a comparison with each of his 3-day weather maps but life is way too short... For the single national/broad-scale values I can reasonably assume uncorrelated errors on the forecast and thus easily calculate a p-value.

As for the Grand National, I'll update you on Sunday from my retirement in the Bahamas :-)