Computations for forecasts of weather (and at greater time and space scales of seasonal outlooks) rely on good housekeeping, and in respect of the extensive thermodynamic state variable entropy this has not always been properly accomplished, and there is a great gap in our understanding. Inferential sleuthing through data from orbiting satellites is expected to lead to novel progress. Such a possibility has hitherto never been comprehended. Furthermore, by getting behind and cooperating with existing research groups, we expect to enhance progress.

Gradual progress is being made, by thousands of individual researchers happily toiling away in their respective places of work. There is no longer any reasonable doubt about global warming and man's influence. See the paper by Pingzhong Zhang and 16 coauthors mostly from China, with American contributions from Minneapolis (MN) and Irvine (CA). They describe "A Test of Climate, Sun, and Culture Relationships from an 1810-Year Chinese Cave Record" (Science, 7 November 2008, pp 940-942, which is accompanied by a useful news focus on Archaeology in China). Their own data from came just one stalagmite in Wanxiang Cave at 33.32°N, 105.0°E, altitude 1200 m:

Supplementary data from the Science paper, with thanks to Science and the authors

Rather like the study of tree rings, the authors studied isotopes of water deposited on their stalagmite by drops of water dripping from the roof of the cave. The data told them about monsoon rain amounts. I published a paper on tree rings myself, generously helped by Phil Jones of the Climate Research Unit. (Phil Jones has been maligned by people who don't realize when and when not to take his words seriously - as has happened to me quite often.) The notorious hockey stick graph by Michael Mann and Phil Jones is shown in the context of other such graphs within the Science paper. It looks a bit wild among the other graphs. At a relatively early date, the truth of the matter was made clear without reference to any controversy.

The authors of the Science paper pointed out close correspondences between rain epochs and Chinese dynasties. Their abstract ends by saying that the sign of the correlation between the Asian Monsoon and temperature (related to an anomaly called delta(18)O among oxygen isotopes) switches around 1960, suggesting that anthropogenic forcing superseded natural forcing as the major driver of Asian Monsoon changes in the late 20th century.

Looking ahead to the future, it becomes clear that forecasting of weather and climate must eventually be tied to details of topographic features - coastlines and mountains and known singular localities. Diurnal cycles are of overwhelming importance; see Caroline Bain et al., 2010: "Diurnal cycle of the intertropical convergence zone in the east Pacific", (J. Geophys. Res., 115, D23116, doi:10.1029/2010JD014835). See also my observations from "Southbound/northbound traverses on 5 July 1979" of convective sweepers - squall lines - triggered most probably via diurnal effects. (This stunning explanation came 20 years after my work.)

For our atmosphere entropy is energy per unit of temperature; compare specific volume which is energy per unit of pressure. It would be unthinkable to be sloppy about specific volume (volume per unit mass, i.e. 1/density); but we've been disgracefully sloppy about entropy. Only in 1997 was it pointed out by Donald Johnson that this was probably the cause of the "general coldness of climate models" (J. Atmos. Sci., 10, 11, 2826-46).

There is an aspect of entropy budgeting that hitherto has altogether escaped attention, even in a fine volume of short review pieces by leaders in their respective fields, Non-equilibrium Thermodynamics and the Production of Entropy, 2005, Axel Kleidon and Ralph A. Lorez, Editors, ISBN 3-540-22495-5. At scales larger than those of individual plants (which do receive mention in the book), what happens as a result of absorption of sunlight? The light disappears, and out of the reckoning goes its extremely low specific entropy. "So far as the fluid is concerned, these events take place outside the fluid system and are of no direct relevance to meteorology or climate theory, .." (Richard Goody and Wedad Abdou, "Reversible and irreversible processes of radiation entropy", QJRMS, Jan 1996 Part B, 122, 483-94). I made a fool of myself by obstinately protesting about this work, in submissions from 1996-9 which were repeatedly rejected by the editors of QJRMS. I charity-bet £200 that the paper "Theoretical maximum for energy from direct and diffuse sunlight", by William H. Press, did not exist. I lost the bet, but the charity of the referee of my work didn't get the money because the wrong date was specified!

Having at length made friends with Professor Richard Goody, I got on to him about the work of Donald Johnson, of whom he had not heard. Then Goody wrote about "Sources and Sinks of Climate Entropy" (QJRMS, July 2000 Part A, 126, 1953-70), a classic paper largely in response to Donald Johnson. For me this was one of those rare moments when one knows that one's efforts are not in vain.

Roughly equal amounts of energy come in via short wave radiation and and go out via long wave radiation. The solar input excitingly comes in at low entropy; the solar output boringly goes out at high entropy. The excitement is because the low entropy of the input appears after initial absorption in the form of details of structures. See for instance all the little clouds - and then some big ones - over a tropical ocean heated from below by solar radiation. The entropy of such structures should be explored.

First choose what to measure. I would favour radiance data at microwave frequencies. At the 15th Conf. on Hurricanes and Tropical Meteorology, Jan 9-12, 1984, Miami, Florida, Postprints published by the Amer. Meteor. Soc., I presented "Satellite Observations of a Monsoon Depression". The first Microwave Sounding Unit had a nice fat little footprints of area near 50000 km², like a circle of diameter 80 km.

What is meant by a footprint? Out in the dark with a nice torch of narrow beam, an illuminated area is seen - the footprint. Illumination is strongest in the middle and fades out at the periphery; the footprint is defined in terms of half-power beamwidth. A radiometer is like a torch in reverse: it receives energy from the footprint. From where in a direction along the beam does the radiant energy come? That depends upon what frequency/wavelength has been chosen for the radiometer, and also upon all the little radiators which contribute to the recorded overall brightness temperature. Careers are devoted to building radiometers and calculating functions of relative importance along a beam direction of specified distributions of gases and hydrometeors. World leaders in this field, the British at Oxford University were led recently by Fred Taylor; I worked there in 1984-6. Present occasionally was Sir John Houghton FRS. His book The Physics of Atmospheres is a small masterpiece, and he used to find witty encouragement for everybody.

My 1984 monsoon depression work was produced under pressure and in a rush (as usual). Results were promising but not conclusive (as usual). My paper never received any reviewer's crits, such a vital part of science. In these and other ways, great masses of data should be accumulated at selected scales of space and time, loudly chatty about what may be going on.

The second problem is to how to listen thoughtfully to this chatter. How are we to make sense of the data, to find signals among noise? Such problems were tackled at Bell Telephone Laboratories shortly after World War II, when telephone engineers wanted to transmit data efficiently down telephone lines. Claude Shannon in 1949 published a classic treatise on the statistical properties of signals. He was happy to find that these were closely parallel to statistics from Boltzmann's kinetic theory of gases, and started to study information entropy. Roderick Dewar is one of the latest exploiters of this line of thinking. He has a chapter in Non-equilibrium Thermodynamics and the Production of Entropy, 2005, quoted above.

A domain is divided into tiny boxes, the signal in each is determined, and statistics of their distributions are examined. Setting aside scruples about mathematical rigour, it seems that all of the definitions of box sizes, averages ... can be specified quite arbitrarily. An infinite variety of information entropies can be invented: one can try out different ones. Now we are into patient sleuthing, going over evidence of patterning again and again until secrets are teased forth.

Optimistic assault on a forecasting problem has to be tempered with realism. There are many influences and they interact. Furthermore, there must be random variations. Random or stochastic processes should be thought of as necessary "evolution processes". Nature is necessarily playful. Little perturbations happen and mess things up. Messes have lots of structure; they contain lots of information. One may measure information entropy. Complicated processes yield low information entropy. Incoming radiation form the Sun is of very low entropy. After it gets absorbed its low entropy reappears in the form of complexity of structures of clouds and other perturbations. So don't expect it to be easy to make weather and climate forecasts.

Qualities of a successful forecaster must be like those of a teacher of a large class of children. Teacher has to love them all and get to know how they behave by ceaseless vigilance; teacher has to develop senses of what's going on - to detect which child might be becoming dominant. So with a forecaster of seasonal outlooks. Sometimes it may become possible to be fairly confident as to what's going to happen; at other times not. Ceaseless vigilance and readiness to adjust is probably going to be necessary. A forecaster's customers should be enlightened about circumstances and given some education along the way.

Why should a big utility company - via contribution through the umbrella group Hindhead Together - contribute funds for (a few modest few rooms in) Undershaw, and in particular some person-years of salaries, and expect and expect to leave us alone for four years? Because merely saving Undershaw would carry immense international credit, and because weather and climate forecasting are rather loose - not very impressive - and one expects that better housekeeping in respect of entropy will tighten things up. Better knowledge of evolutions of entropy may provide constraints, perhaps via cumulus parameterization, with which to enforce better performance on computer forecasts of weather and climate.

In respect of seasonal outlooks at 4 months range, while it may now be comprehend why forcings of large amplitude and small scale will be severely limiting, it should be possible available to see things coming. My successful forecaster friend Richard Grumm scrutinized "The Central European and Russian Heat Event of July-August 2010" [Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., 92, 10, 1285-96]. He did not identify a major aspect of the event that appeared susceptible to forecast. I think that it would be prosperous to adopt an optimistic attitude and go seek likely forcing influences.

The UWCRU should have four young wizards perform their magic on personal laptop computers in rooms in the extension of Undershaw. There are many lines of research to pursue by studying archived data, and I would expect meteorological overheads to be minimal. [An encouraging invitation to utilize "Globally Gridded Satellite Observations for Climate Studies" (GridSat) has just been issued by Kenneth Knapp et al., (Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., 92, July 2011, 893-907). The most suitable of these data appear to be on water vapour; infra red and visible radiation are featured, but not the longer microwaves.] The sum of £0.8million might support the four wizards of UWCRU for four years. I would act for free and would probably mostly just irritate other excessively busy people arguing noisily in different languages or ripping out pages from one from my vast collection of priceless paper journals.

Scientists should communicate science to the public, and titles like "A Housewife's Guide to   Climate" should be contemplated as a change from study of data. Such BLUE SKIES work would promote both Undershaw and our backer(s).

I hope before long to invite friends like Dr Vyacheslav Zakharov and Professor Atsumu Ohmura to visit Undershaw, enjoy its magical atmosphere, and walk around our Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.

From a large utility company, what initial 4 year investment should be sought? £3.5 million would seem appropriate. We would be a Registered Charity with tax advantages, and with title deeds of properties held as security by our backer(s). The investment has built-in positive feedback. [Slowly people are wising up to the reality that there could be masses of available money for projects like this.]