German Weather Service Says Predicting More Than 10 Days Out Is “Like Reading Tea Leaves”

With summer officially about to begin, a number of weather services are making seasonal forecasts for Germany and Central Europe. Read here.

The English-language The Local writes:

Donnerwetter.de meteorologist Karsten Brandt said odds were ‘high that the weather will turn out sunny with a tendency to be dry.’

Wetter.net meteorologist Dominik Jung also predicted a warm, albeit changeable summer.

‘Short heatwaves of a few days will be followed quickly by cooling in the form of fierce storms with heavy rains,’ Jung said, adding that tornadoes were possible.”

Surprisingly the DWD German Weather Service, like the Met Office, refuses to make a seasonal forecast, though their forecasts have been better than those of the Met Office (that requires getting it right only once). Interestingly the DWD doesn’t have much faith in forecasts that go beyond 10 days – even with all them fancy super computers that can crank out global warming forecasts 100 years out. The Local writes:

But the official German Weather Service’s (DWD) Helmut Malewski said in a statement that predicting more that 10 days ahead is like ‘reading tea leaves’.”

Clearly Germany is now in a period of unsettled weather, one that looks set to stay for a few more days, but not until June 27 – which is so-called Siebenschläfer Day, which is like St. Swithins Day in the UK. The saying goes: If on St Swithins day comes the rain, for forty days it will remain.

Unsettled weather in Germany on June 27 would mean the chances are about 66% that the summer will be unsettled too – that’s what the statistics show. But right now the forecast for next week (June 27) looks sunny.