Here's a clip that I have clipped out of the 30th April 2009 BBC forecast on the Met Office prediction for summer 2009. If you look carefully at the start of the clip, you can see the infamous sound bite "odds on barbecue summer". This what I think did the damage, it hung around that forecast like a bad smell

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Thankfully there press office has improved since then and now ludicrous warnings regarding barbecues and mediterrean plants are a thing of the past.

I think the MetO was right to abandon the use of public seasonal forecasts like this but IMO it was mainly a problem of format and presentation and I would hope that given a better way of presenting the data, they mighr return some day

The general public are OK with the use of probabilities when it comes to horse racing odds and betting but not for seasonal weather forecasting

The fact that  a 70% chance of an average or better summer also means a 30% chance of a worse than average summer is a tricky concept for most people when you're trying to plan you're July holiday and is not really of any practical use

I agree the media just latched onto the "barbecue summer"  tag line but if someone could come up with a better way of including this uncertainty in the prognosois they might be able to start up again

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I think the public would grasp probabilities far better than OTT comments regarding barbecue summers etc, etc. A simple graph outlining the seasonal probabilities is the way forward.

What surprises me is why did they so promoted this forecast especially when they issued this at the end of April? There was still a month to go until the meteorological summer began and yet this forecast was given so much publicity. I have years of old BBC forecasts and I have never seen such a seasonal forecast be so promoted.I can only assume the Met Office thought it would be a good news story considering how grim economically it was around that time. If that were the case then it was wrong.

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I make my living from the fact the general public does not understand probabilities when it comes to horse racing odds. The general public backs the horse they think will win, regardless of the odds. In reality they're backing the horse they think likeliest to win, which is something very different. But only a minute number of punters are able to grasp that subtle difference, never mind the corollary that to have any chance of success you have to back prices, not horses or "what you fancy".

Does everyone at the Met Office grasp this difference and understand your point about a 70% chance of an average or warmer summer implying a 30% chance of a colder than average one? On the evidence of the Barbecue Summer forecast and my experience of people in general, perhaps not.

My solution? Get rid of this arbitrarily bound "average" category. Why should a randomly picked spread of, say 0.5C either side of the actual average have a category all of its own? Just give us two numbers: the chance of it being warmer than average and the chance of it being cooler than average. I doubt the numbers would often be any more extreme than 60% vs 40%, which would send out a more plausible message to the public, i.e. seasonal forecasts are impossible, even for the Met Office.

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Indeed Kevin.

After the summer of 2009 turned into yet another poor one and when the knives came out for the Met Office over this headline and the forecast, I questioned the wisdom of producing such a soundbite. OK. perhaps the media did take the forecast out of context to some extent and made too much of the BBQ summer headline, but for me the main fault lay with those at the Met Office's press department. It was all very well to come out afterwards and say things like "Well although we said there was a 65% chance of a good summer, we also said at the same time that there was a 35% chance of it being a poor one", but why the heck didn't they think about that before they gave the green light to the now infamous strapline being used? They were tha authors of their own downfall in this respect, and they must have known that if the forecast did not go as planned, they would get torn to shreds by the press and the general public.

 

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Ahh...there's nothing quite like a toasty barbie to warm you up on a cold wet weekend - great forecast  

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