A couple of days ago, Mrs Hill commented that she could no longer find the Met Office's seasonal forecast. We had a bit of a dig around the Met Office website and there indeed seemed to be no mention of a spring forecast.

In the rush of activity after the hearings on Monday, I neglected to follow this up, but the Met Office has now come clean anyway. The seasonal forecasts are to be scrapped.

The Met Office is to abandon its long-term and seasonal forecasting after criticism for failing to predict extreme weather. It was berated for not forseeing that the UK would suffer this cold winter or the last three wet summers in its seasonal forecasts. The forecasts, four times a year, will be replaced by monthly predictions.

It's hard to see this as a bad thing, given that the Met Office were becoming a laughing stock as a result of their wildly inaccurate predictions.

But wait - here's a thing. Remember back to those hearings on Monday. What was it that Professor Slingo said about climate models?

At least for the UK the codes that underpin our climate change projections are the same codes that we use to make our daily weather forecasts, so we test those codes twice a day for robustness.

Now, note that she is talking about daily weather forecast not the seasonal ones, so I think there is a reasonable case to make that the forecasts that have been scrapped may be based on a different model to the daily weather forecasts. But isn't this all a bit odd? They can forecast short-term and they can forecast long-term, but in the medium term it's all too hard? It doesn't really make sense, does it? And then again can it really be the case that the models for the short and long-term are different to the ones for the medium term?

I claim no particular expertise here; it just looks rather strange.