WEATHER

Deliveries have started arriving at a new £400,000 salt shed in Derby. The facility is designed to hold 5,000 tonnes of grit which is expected to be enough for the toughest of winters. Chris Poulter, from Derby City Council, said a lack of grit capacity last year forced the council to spend extra on emergency supplies. He said, "If the city's main routes aren't clear the city could grind to a halt. It's a massive financial problem for the city if roads can't function."

The facility is designed to be environmentally friendly and save the authority money. Rain falling on its domed roof is stored and used to wash the council's vehicles and a translucent roof means less lighting is needed. The council says other technology investments should mean less grit is needed in future. David Kinsey, an area manager for highways at Derby City Council, said the council was changing the way it decided how much grit to use.

He said, "We're looking at getting a weather station for the city. That will mean we can get a specific forecast for the city of Derby as opposed to the current one which is for the whole of southern Derbyshire. That means on marginal nights, when the temperature is getting close to freezing, we may not need to go out gritting. That will save us money." (Source: BBC News, Nov/11)

Britain sold off its dwindling road salt supplies just weeks before the big freeze brought traffic to a halt. More than 28,000 tons of salt were exported in a month, despite councils being warned to stock up for a harsh winter. When the freeze arrived in December, bungling officials had to order more salt from abroad, and pay top prices for it. The great grit mountain sell-off was revealed in new figures released in the Commons.

They showed we sold 28,728 tons of salt abroad in November while shipping in 15,280, a net export of about 13,500 tons. Shadow transport secretary Theresa Villiers said, "These revelations will not be welcomed by the people who were trapped by ungritted roads and pavements this winter. Even allowing for notorious flaws in weather forecasts, the fact that the UK was shipping salt around the world and then calling for emergency imports just a few weeks later smacks of woeful mismanagement." (Source: News of the World, Feb/10)

According to a leading meteorological expert we’ve already had more weather this year than in the last three years put together. Latest figures show that Cloud Bank Shift is up by a record 4% as are Sunshine Penetration Units. And that’s not all. Last winter saw an unprecedented rise in Sleet Downput with Surface Slush Factor soaring by a whopping 72%! In fact, almost all weather behaviour patterns have increased and in some cases almost doubled. We spoke to weather expert Suzanne Fish. "Weather is rife just now," she told us. "You name it, we’re getting it. And there’s more to come, so don’t put away your sun cream, umbrellas or snowshoes just yet."

However, Suzanne stressed that the 6.2% extra rainfall that we've been experiencing is, in fact, the wrong kind of rain. "It’s not been the sort that fills reservoirs so I’m afraid we must prepare ourselves for the standpipes once again." So what is causing this current weather surplus? Suzanne explains, "There are several theories. One suggests that a slight gravitational increase means that more weather is being sucked down from the stratosphere. Another popular theory is that the hole in the ozone layer has somehow slipped down from the North Pole and is now hovering over a point just north of Grimsby. However, the most likely explanation is the Faulty-Barometer-At-The-London-Weather-Centre-Theory. I’m not entirely convinced but, I must admit, we do forget to tap it sometimes."

How long is this spell likely to last? "Weather booms are very unpredictable so make the most of it while you can," Suzanne urged us. "The last weather recession, back in 1973, lasted for over three years and we all remember how depressing that was." Suzanne, who’s hobbies include gardening, knitting and drinking, makes another startling claim. "Although wind speed has only been affected slightly, hurricanes are occurring much more frequently, especially when we're not expecting them. Everyone used to be preoccupied with the ‘Greenhouse Effect’, now the worrying issue is what effect the high winds will have on greenhouses."

"I, for one, am replacing my existing panels with special ones made from toughened glass, before it’s too late," she added. As for the forecast, Suzanne told us that according to her pine cone there was a 150% risk of widespread snow reaching all parts of Britain by lunchtime, but she couldn’t pinpoint in which month.

The Met Office is celebrating 150 years by unveiling a new supercomputer which they predict will put them at the forefront of weather forecasting. The new system will allow meterologists to provide more accurate advice to the government and the public in the face of increasingly extreme weather patterns and is one of the most sophisticated in Europe. It allows forecasters to track weather patterns across the world, from a massive dust storm to a single cloud. Such technology makes it easy to forget how far forecasting has come, the Met Office says.

It was the invention of the telegraph that allowed the rapid collation of weather observations across large areaswhich, in turn, allowed forecasters first to chart, and then predict weather patterns. The Met Office, which started using these methods to provide a storm warning service for sailors, now processes 100,000 million pieces of data every day in its computer models, with considerable commerical spin-offs. In hot weather, demand for wasp killer increases by up to 500% and leg wax sales go up more than 10-fold, information that supermarkets are happy to pay for.

The Met Office is blocking public scrutiny of the central role played by its top climate scientist in a highly controversial report by the beleaguered United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Professor John Mitchell, the Met Office’s Director of Climate Science, shared responsibility for the most worrying headline in the 2007 Nobel Prize-winning IPCC report, that the Earth is now hotter than at any time in the past 1,300 years. And he approved the inclusion in the report of the famous ‘hockey stick’ graph, showing centuries of level or declining temperatures until a steep 20th Century rise.

By the time the 2007 report was being written, the graph had been heavily criticised by climate sceptics who had shown it minimised the ‘medieval warm period’ around 1000AD, when the Vikings established farming settlements in Greenland. In fact, according to some scientists, the planet was then as warm, or even warmer, than it is today. Early drafts of the report were fiercely contested by official IPCC reviewers, who cited other scientific papers stating that the 1,300-year claim and the graph were inaccurate but the final version, approved by Prof Mitchell, the relevant chapter’s review editor, swept aside these concerns.

Now, the Met Office is refusing to disclose Prof Mitchell’s working papers and correspondence with his IPCC colleagues in response to requests filed under the Freedom of Information Act. The block has been endorsed in writing by Defence Secretary Bob Ainsworth, whose department has responsibility for the Met Office. Documents reveal that the Met Office’s stonewalling was part of a co-ordinated, legally questionable strategy by climate change academics linked with the IPCC to block access to outsiders.

Last month, the Information Commissioner ruled that scientists from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, the source of the leaked ‘Warmergate’ emails, acted unlawfully in refusing FOI requests to share their data. Some of the FOI requests made to them came from the same person who has made requests to the Met Office. He is David Holland, an electrical engineer familiar with advanced statistics who has written several papers questioning orthodox thinking on global warming.

The Met Office’s first response to Mr Holland was a claim that Prof Mitchell’s records had been ‘deleted’ from its computers. Later, officials admitted they did exist after all, but could not be disclosed because they were ‘personal’, and had nothing to do with the professor’s Met Office job. Finally, they conceded that this too was misleading because Prof Mitchell had been paid by the Met Office for his IPCC work and had received Government expenses to travel to IPCC meetings. The Met Office had even boasted of his role in a Press release when the report first came out.

But disclosure, they added, was still rejected on the grounds it would ‘inhibit the free and frank provision of advice or the free and frank provision of views’. It would also ‘prejudice Britain’s relationship with an international organisation’ and thus be contrary to UK interests. In a written response justifying the refusal dated August 20, 2008, Mr Ainsworth, then MoD Minister of State, used exactly the same language. Mr Holland also filed a request for the papers kept by Sir Brian Hoskins of Reading University, who was the review editor of a different chapter of the IPCC report.

When this too was refused, Mr Holland used the Data Protection Act to obtain a copy of an email from Sir Brian to the university’s information officer. The email, dated July 17, 2008, when Mr Holland was also trying to get material from the Met Office and the CRU, provides clear evidence of a co-ordinated effort to hide data. Sir Brian wrote, "I have made enquiries and found that both the Met Office/MOD and UEA are resisting the FOI requests made by Holland. The latter are very relevant to us, as UK universities should speak with the same voice on this. I gather that they are using academic freedom as their reason."

At the CRU, as the Warmergate emails reveal, its director, Dr Phil Jones (who is currently suspended), wrote to an American colleague, "We are still getting FOI requests as well as Reading. All our FOI officers have been in discussions and are now using the same exceptions, not to respond." Benny Peiser, director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, said the affair further undermined the credibility of the IPCC and those associated with it.

He said, "It’s of critical importance that data such as this should be open. More importantly, the questions being raised about the hockey stick mean that we may have to reassess the climate history of the past 2,000 years. The attempt to make the medieval warm period disappear is being seriously weakened, and the claim that now is the warmest time for 1,300 years is no longer based on reliable evidence." Despite repeated requests, the MoD and Met Office failed to comment. (Source: Daily Mail, Feb/10)

Met Office staff have picked up more than £12million in bonuses in the last five years, despite the fact their weather forecast is all too often wrong. Last year, the forecasters got more than £2.3million in performance related pay, just weeks before predicting a 'barbecue summer'. As millions will recall, the summer of 2009 was a washout. Its chief executive earned around £40,000 in bonuses, bringing his pay to £200,000.

In April, chief meteorologist Ewen McCallum forecast temperatures of over 30C, adding, "We should be seeing some good hot spells and perhaps get the old barbecue out." But despite a hot and sunny June, July was a wash out and August fared little better. It also failed to predict the coldest winter in more than three decades, forecasting a milder than average winter in October.

Junior defence minister Kevan Jones said, "Met Office staff are eligible to receive performance-related pay based on achievements against specific targets agreed and monitored by the Met Office Board, which are linked to the success of the Met Office at either individual, team or organisational level. Payments are non-consolidated and represent part of Met Office staff remuneration which is at risk and needs to be re-earned each year." (Source: Daily Mail, Feb/10)