Met Office Accurately Predicts Winter Weather A Year In Advance

An anonymous reader writes: The UK’s Met Office has revealed new seasonal forecasting capabilities which enable the weather service to predict winter climate changes up to a year in advance. The development has been made possible thanks to supercomputer technology granted by the UK Government in 2014. The £97 million high-performance computing facility has allowed researchers to increase the resolution of climate models and to test the retrospective skill of forecasts over a 35-year period starting from 1980. The forecasters claim that new supercomputer-powered techniques have helped them develop a system to accurately predict North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) – the climatic phenomenon which heavily impacts winters in the UK. Lead researcher Nick Dunstone commented that the ability to now understand and predict the NAO could have significant economic benefits for a range of sectors, including transport, energy, water management, and the insurance industry.