Meteorologists define summer in the UK to be the period from June to August so summer is now over and we are officially in autumn. I have decided to create a series of posts which I will publish at the end of each season showing how that season compares to the weather record. The 2017 summer was wet but unremarkable otherwise and actually quite typical of recent summers as I will explain.
UK Weather Tracker #7 – August 2017
My latest UK weather tracker shows that August was just like July in being an unremarkable month. This means the meteorological summer of 2017 has also been unremarkable just as I have been predicting for the last few years.
EPL 2017/18 #1 – What are you expecting for your team this season?
The 2017/18 English Premier League (EPL) kicked off yesterday with Arsenal beating Hull 4-3. Tomorrow, my team Newcastle United will be playing my wife’s team Tottenham Hotspur so marital harmony could be in short supply! Be that as it may, what should fans of the Magpies and Spurs be expecting this season? Newcastle are a recently promoted team whilst Spurs were runners up last season Is there a way to set realistic expectations for the 2017/18 season?
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UK Weather Tracker #6 – July 2017
My latest UK weather tracker shows that July has been an unremarkable month and it would appear that the summer in 2017 will also be unremarkable. Believe it or not, I have predicting this for the last few years and I will explain why in a separate post in September.
UK General Election 2017 #7 – Review of my predictions
Exactly one month ago, the UK woke up to the news that they had elected a hung parliament for the second time in 3 elections. For many forecasters including myself, this came as a surprise as I had been predicting a Conservative majority of 100 seats. In the event, the largest ever polling underestimate of the Labour vote was enough to see the Conservatives lose their majority.
At the beginning of my commentary on election night itself, I defined success for my forecasts as being how close the number of Conservative seats was to my forecast of 375. I also stated that if the number of seats was in the 340s I would consider this to be a prediction error. The final outcome was 317 seats so clearly that is a major prediction error.
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UK Weather Tracker #5 – June 2017
My latest UK weather tracker shows that the meteorological summer started with a hot but stormy June.
UK General Elections #2 – How accurate are the opinion polls? – updated with GE17
Ahead of the 2017 general election, I predicted that the opinion polls would be wrong again and that the Conservatives lead over Labour would be underestimated by 2.6%. I based this on data provided by Mark Pack who has systematically recorded every opinion poll published since 1945. In the event, I was right that the polls would be wrong but instead of an error favouring the Conservatives, the polls recorded the largest ever underestimate of the Labour vote. As a result, election forecasters were blindsided yet again and the result was a hung parliament which few saw coming.
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UK Weather Tracker #4 – May 2017
I apologise for the lateness of this post. The general election took up a lot of my time and energy but from now on I have no excuse not to keep this up to date.
My latest UK weather tracker shows that it was the 2nd warmest May since 1910.
UK Weather Trends #1 – Spring 2017
Meteorologists define spring in the UK to be the period from March to May so spring is now over and we are officially in summer. I have decided to create a series of posts which I will publish at the end of each season showing how that season compares to the weather record. The 2017 spring turned out to be the 2nd warmest on record.
UK General Election 2017 Results #1 – My Election Night Commentary
Friday 07:35 – I’ve just woken up to the result that we have a hung parliament which is miles away from my prediction. Clearly I need to conduct a post-mortem of my model but I did state in my first chart of this post (see bottom of post) that a hung parliament would occur if the CON-LAB lead was under 3%. Sure enough that is the outcome with the BBC currently saying the CON-LAB lead is 2.3%. What it also means that we have another epic polling error as the average of all polls in the week before the election showed a CON-LAB lead of 7.5%. Unlike 2015 when all pollsters got it, congratulations must go to Survation who called it spot on.
I am sure we will have a wave of people claiming to have predicted this error. As far as I am concerned a valid prediction is only one made in public in advance. Such a prediction would also need to explain why they expected a polling error on the scale shown in the chart.
The last time such an error occurred was 1983 and the error is on the scale of 1951! In fact the error is even more remarkable if you look at the 3 main parties.
Another polling post mortem beckons but this election will go down in history.
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