They have faithfully provided predications about Britain’s notoriously variable weather for more than 150 years, but even the Met Office has been forced to admit that it is baffled by the recent unseasonable conditions to have hit the UK.
Experts from around Britain are being brought together by the Met Office next week for a special meeting in an attempt to unpick what has been causing the spate of unusual seasons.
They will examine what may be responsible for the cold winter of 2010, the wet summer last year and the cold spring this year, all of which have ranked as the most extreme on record.
The step is being seen as an unprecedented move as scientists are normally reluctant to attribute unusual weather events to climate change, but the organisers say the unusual seasonal conditions have raised important questions about how our weather patterns are changing.
Stephen Belcher, head of the Met Office Hadley Centre who has organised the workshop, said the underlying cause of these major shifts from the average seasonal weather was “unclear”.
He said: "We have seen a run of unusual seasons in the UK and northern Europe, such as the cold winter of 2010, last year's wet weather and the cold spring this year.
"This may be nothing more than a run of natural variability, but there may be other factors impacting our weather.
“For example, there is emerging research which suggests there is a link between declining Arctic sea ice and European climate – but exactly how this process might work, and how important it may be among a host of other factors, remains unclear.”
The meeting will be attended by at least 20 leading climate and meteorological experts from around the UK.
Professor Julia Slingo, the Met Office chief scientist, is due to present data that has been gathered to help explain the cold, wet spring experienced in 2013.
This year saw one of the coldest springs on record, with the average temperature in March being just 2.2C, the second coldest since records began in 1910.
Last year also ranks as the second wettest on record with the summer experiencing the worst of the rainfall following a hose pipe ban in many parts of the country in the early half of the year.
It is thought that in both cases, a shift in the position of a stream of air in the upper atmosphere known as the jet stream allowed weather normally seen north east of the UK to sweep across the country.
What is less clear are the underlying causes for this.
In a scientific briefing paper produced by Professor Slingo, she said changes in air currents and temperatures in other parts of the world could be responsible for the unusually cold spring in 2013.
These included an increase in strength of an air current over the tropics called the Madden Julian Oscillation, warming in the upper statrosphere during January, a change in sea surface temperatures in the Atlantic and loss of Arctic sea ice.
She said: “Preliminary and ongoing research at the Met Office Hadley Centre is providing increasing evidence that the loss and thinning of Arctic sea ice predisposes the winter and spring atmospheric circulation over the North Atlantic and Europe to negative North Atlantic Oscillation regimes, as was experienced at the start of this spring.”
The meeting has been organised over the past two months in response to growing concerns about the changing weather patterns around the world.
Farmers have reported that wheat harvests in 2013 are likely to be around 30% lower than last year as a result of unusual weather conditions since last summer.
Beekeepers have also reported that a third of honeybee colonies failed to survive the winter following the wet weather last summer and this years cold spring.
The Met Office has been heavily criticised in recent years for failing to accurately predict the unusual seasonal conditions in its long range forecasts.
It recently admitted that its three month forecasts are only correct about 65 per cent of the time.
Benny Peiser, from the Global Warming Policy Foundation, added: “The Met Office’s temperature forecasts issued in 12 out of the last 13 years have been too warm.
"None of the forecasts issued ended up too cold. That makes the errors systemic and significant.”
However, it is hoped that next week's workshop can identify new research that needs to be conducted and whether changes need to be made to the computer models the Met Office uses to make predictions.
Dr James Screen, a research fellow on climate systems at the University of Exeter and one of the co-organisers of the Met Office meeting, said: “There is a will to do this now because it is of such importance.
“There is not just interest in the UK but around the world – I am going to two similar workshops in the US and Iceland where they also just had an unusually cold winter.
“The evidence is still inconclusive about whether we are seeing an increase in extreme events due to climate change. There is a lot of speculation about what might be driving these.
“The Met Office have been looking at solar variability on the impact on winters in the UK for example along with major drivers like El Nino or the North Atlantic Oscillation."