An article by Jon Ungoed-Thomas in yesterday’s Sunday Times talks about the recent spell of fine weather in contrast to an apparent “prediction” from the Met Office of a “decade of soggy summers”.

This is despite the Met Office making it very clear that it did not issue any such prediction.

The article follows up on media coverage of a science workshop held at the Met Office in June this year to look at the recent run of unusual seasons in the UK.

During the press conference held after that meeting, research from the University of Reading was raised – you can read more about that on our blog.

The following press coverage was mixed, with some media outlets accurately representing the research, while others portrayed it as a forecast for a decade of washout summers. We discussed this in a blog the next day.

Here’s a couple of key highlights quotes directly from that blog article:

• [This research] does not mean every summer will be a ‘washout’ for the next decade and shouldn’t be taken as a deterministic forecast for what we will see in the years to come.

• [The] research suggests there is a tendency towards a higher frequency of wetter than average summers – so we could still see summers which buck this trend.

• [This] research is still at an early phase and more work needs to be done to see exactly how this process works and how we can predict its influence on future seasons… it’s fair to say that you shouldn’t write off summers for the next decade or so.