A WEEK or two ago some of you may have caught a BBC television programme in the QED series called Sunshine with Scattered Showers. It told the story of one Piers Corbyn, an astrophysicist at the South Bank University in London, who says he can produce accurate weather forecasts for several months ahead. Indeed, Corbyn has found a novel way to prove his point: he places bets on his forecasts with a national bookmaker and claims to win four times out of every five.
Corbyn's methodology, which he calls the "Solar Weather Technique", is apparently based on the not implausible assumption that erratic variations in the energy output of the sun can affect our climate. But the details remain a closely guarded secret. All he will say is that 12 years ago, while studying the processes of galaxy formation, he stumbled across a connection between sunspots and our earthly weather. It is believed that he assesses the output of the sun in all its forms - electro magnetic radiation, particle emission and magnetic forces, but no one knows exactly how he relates these variables to the daily movement of depressions across the North Atlantic.
The accepted wisdom among conventional forecasters is that the relationship between solar output and our weather week by week is tenuous in the extreme - so tenuous that any attempt to use it for long range forecasting must be doomed to failure. Indeed, the missing link, if there is any, between solar activity and the weather has been the Holy Grail of many an optimistic meteorologist down the years.
But Corbyn is undeterred by the official sceptics. Indeed, he has turned his prediction scheme into a nice little earner by providing long range forecasts to insurance companies who want to indemnify themselves against catastrophic happenings, to utility companies wishing to predict future energy demands, and to supermarkets who want to anticipate the requirements for weather sensitive products on their shelves. And these customers, Dr Corbyn says, are happy.
As the good doctor and his team rejoice in what they claim are their frequent and remarkable successes, conventional meteorologists prefer to emphasise the failures, whose number and extent, they say, are equally spectacular. Their scepticism is enhanced by the fact that Corbyn refuses to reveal his methodology - for the very plausible reason, according to the latter, that it could be hijacked. He has promised, however, to reveal all eventually. Then, perhaps, we may think as Dr Watson did: "Like all Holmes's reasoning, the thing seemed simplicity itself when it was once explained."