Listening to the radio the other day I heard a feature about predictions of a dire winter to come, the worst for a hundred years. It think it was on the Today programme, and they were reporting an article in the Daily Mail, or some other paper. I didn't gather who was making the prediction, or how credible they were, or what their past track record was, and let it pass me by, since it seems as though every year the media get excited over forecasts of extreme weather, then allow those that don't materialise to pass without further comment. Apart from the Met Office, that is, and their much ridiculed predictions of a barbecue summer. I did have a look on the Met website later on, but they have stopped publishing medium range forecasts for public consumption, presumably discouraged by the public's inability or unwillingness to grasp the concept of probability.
Looking out of the kitchen window this morning at the gravel garden in the turning circle, with the olive, the extra-blue, extra tender form of Teucrium, the Phlomis italica, myrtle and variegated Luma, and the lemon scented Aloysia, not to mention the rosemary, Acca, and Buddleia 'Silver Anniversary' (which took so long to recover from those two cold nights last February that it has only just started flowering. It had better get on with it before this year's cold weather arrives) I wondered which of them would survive the winter. Which was a rather depressing thought.
I asked the Systems Administrator about the medium term forecast of a bad winter, and was told that the prediction came from a commercial forecaster, which was quite reputable and sold forecasts to businesses that needed to know badly enough to be willing to pay for them. The SA thought that what they had actually said was not as apocalyptic as what the Today programme said the Daily Mail (or Express, or whoever it was) had said they said. Maybe more along the lines that December and January temperatures could be below average, with some sharp snaps, and some snow. Like winter, in other words. Curiosity then got the better of the SA, who went and invested six pounds buying their premium UK weather forecast for winter 2012-13. I was going to give you their name and a link to their site, but the SA says that if I do that I can't tell you anything about what's in the forecast.
It doesn't honestly make very jolly reading, not if you have a collection of Mediterranean shrubs, and work for a plant centre where trade is already slack, and where you won't get paid at all if you're snowed in and can't get to work. December is likely to be very cold and exceptionally snowy, while parts of eastern England are likely to experience below average temperatures for the vast majority of the month. I summarise. It doesn't say for your six pounds which parts of eastern England are facing the mini ice-age, so that could be Colchester, or Hull. January is predicted to be a re-run of December, then in February things start to return to normal. Normal for February, that is, which is still pretty cold.
Oh dear. It makes me glad I haven't invested in a pair of tickets for the carol concert by candlelight in Long Melford in mid-December in aid of stroke victims, with the choir of one of the Cambridge colleges, which sounded very nice, but as the Systems Administrator said, you don't want to be committed to driving to Long Melford in the middle of December. It's bound to be either foggy or snowing. And my ticket for a bird watching barge trip in the first week of January may have been an unwise purchase. We'd better start stocking up on baked beans and cat food, just in case.
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