Question: can you predict what the weather will be like in 6 months time?

James Pope answered on 25 Jun 2012:

Hi hannahisawesome

At the moment the UK Met Office (who do our weather forecasts when you watch them on the BBC and other TV channels) are joint best in the world (along with the European Weather service ECMWF) at doing weather forecasts on a daily to weekly basis, for example telling us after the news each night what the weather will do for the next 5 days.

ECMWF do a fairly good forecast out to 2 weeks, but after that we really struggle to do a weather forecast for anything longer than this time. We can make broad judgements about how it will be compared to the average for the time of year, like whether we expect a warmer than average or colder than average summer. The Met Office used to release to the media a statement of what they thought would happen based on how the year had gone so far and how some general conditions things like the Jet Stream (a very strong wind high in the atmosphere) were behaving and they would make these statements. Sadly they got one horribly wrong and didn’t see the very cold winter of 2009/10 coming at all. However, once that winter arrived they forecast the arrival of the snow very well.

So, in summary, we can’t predict with any accuracy what the weather will be like in 6 months, but I’ll make a prediction for Christmas Day 2012 (6 months from today 😀 Yay Christmas!)

James P Weather Forecasting Service
Issued for Hannahisawesome on I’m A Scientist Get Me Out of Here!

Christmas Day 2012 will be a very grey affair, lots of cloud about across the whole UK with heavy rain in the South East and East Anglia. Yorkshire and Lincolnshire will have a dry day, but low cloud will continue to be over the whole region. The North East will have the pick of the weather, with a chance of sunshine following an early morning rain shower. Scotland will be cold, but only Avimore in the Cairngorms likely to have a white christmas. North West Scotland will be affected by strong gales especially around Ullapool.

The Lake District will have it’s standard weather with heavy rain affecting the area all day and this rain will persist down into Manchester and Liverpool. Wales will be unusually dry, but like the rest of the country very cloudy. The cloudiness will also be affecting all of Birmingham and the midlands. Finally, the South West, Devon and Cornwall will be wet and cloudy, but a strong wind from the south west will create great surfing conditions for the Christmas Day surfers

In short, a mild day for the UK, with cloud, wind and rain the norm for most people.

We’ll have to see how accurate I am!