Hang on a second. Yesterday the Met still predicted rain, light showers and heavy showers for the rest of the week. I cycled in this morning and it was dry; I look out of the window now and see a nice clear blue sky with some patchy, friendly white clouds. The "bad weather" prediction was obviously wrong.
The Met's forecast for the late arrival of spring is surely backed up by a confidence inspiring certainty level of about 35% at best.
Occasionally you get stories about a "monkey" picking stocks and the results are then pitched against stock recommendations made by "serious" equity analysts. The monkey usually wins.
The Met has excellent potential to improve the accuracy of its forecasts by adopting this monkey approach. All it needs is a blindfolded weatherman, a pinboard, and then "pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey". Hey presto: a weather forecast. A more sophisticated approach would involve multiple pinboards: one with a temperature range, one with wind speeds, one with level of cloud cover, that kind of granularity. The weatherman will have some explaining to do if the forecast is for 0% cloud cover combined with heavy rain, but we'll cross that bridge when we get there.
All that remains is the production of some computer graphics to morph a current satellite photo into the "desired" outcome that matches the weatherman's pin-the-donkey forecast.
