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<\/a><\/p>\nAfter a recent slew of stories claiming we\u2019re in for the coldest winter on record (which weren\u2019t based on information from the Met Office), there are now stories claiming we\u2019re forecasting the wettest winter in 30 years.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s not the case and appears to be a misunderstanding of the Met Office<\/a>\u2019s three-month outlook for contingency planners.<\/p>\n First of all, last winter was the wettest in our digital records dating back to 1910, so if we were to have a wetter winter than that it would be the wettest in over a century \u2013 not just for 30 years.<\/p>\n But that\u2019s not what the Met Office\u2019s contingency planners outlook says. As they\u2019ve pointed out\u00a0here<\/a> many times in the past, this product isn\u2019t like their short range forecasts \u2013 it doesn\u2019t tell you definitively what the weather is going to be and that\u2019s why it\u2019s not really that useful for the public.<\/p>\n What it does do is make an assessment of the\u00a0likelihood<\/em>\u00a0of seeing wetter or drier than average, and milder or colder than average conditions for the whole of the UK for the whole three-month period.<\/p>\n Recent outlooks have been signalling increased risk of milder and wetter conditions for the past couple of months, and indeed that\u2019s what we have seen through October and the start of November. So the most likely predicted outcome is what actually happened for these months \u2013 but that won\u2019t always be the case.<\/p>\n While the recent three-month outlooks also highlighted the risk of more unsettled than average conditions, this does not give specific details or tell us whether any records will be broken.<\/p>\n