The Met Office officials refused to apologise today after admitting that the “barbecue summer” they had predicted was no longer likely.

As rain lashed down on most of Britain, a revised forecast was published suggesting that the weather in August would be changeable with more rain as well as sunny periods.

A Met spokeswoman insisted that updates were always made to long-range forecasts and explained that the earlier prediction had included June and July as well as August.

“’Barbecue summer’ was a phrase that we used to convey the fact that the weather was likely to be better than the last two years,” she said. “People have said to us, that I’ve spoken to, ‘I’ve had more barbecues this summer than in the last two years’.”

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The revised forecast will come as an embarrassment to the Met Office who published a press release in April detailing news of a hot summer. Ewen McCallum, the chief meteorologist, said the wet summers of 2007 and 2008 were highly unlikely to be repeated.

“This year will be much drier than normal,” he predicted. “Get the BBQ out. Probably with spells of weather with the temperature reaching 30 degrees Celsius.”

Philip Eden, vice president of the Royal Meteorological Society, criticised the Met Office for publicising such an optimistic prediction when they had relatively little evidence of how the summer would unfold.

“The key is that these are experimental forecasts. That’s fine by me - it’s exactly what they should be doing,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme:

“They should be doing research into long-range forecasts. The problem is that we don’t actually know very much about the forcing factors, the outside influences which affect the weather during a period of, say, a month or three months ahead.

“The big problem with these forecasts was the spin that was put on it by the Met Office’s press office - the ’barbecue summer’ bit.”

He pointed out that the wording of the forecast was actually “unambitious” and had a “very wide target”. “They simply predicted that temperatures for the summer quarter would be above average,” he said.

It was not the minutiae of the predictions that were repeated in headlines, but the catchy image of outdoor cooking. One of the press officers admitted to The Times in May that the term “barbecue summer” was, in fact, invented by the media team.

Today, the Met Office released a very different prediction. The latest forecast said: “For the rest of summer, rainfall is likely to be near or above average over the UK.”

The Met Office said: “Seasonal forecasting is still a new science. It’s something we are still building on. “When we are looking at seasonal forecasts, we are looking at the season as a whole, not a specific day or week.

“The forecast was for the temperatures to be above average. June temperatures were 1C above average and rainfall was below average, so it’s about putting things into perspective.”

The climbdown comes on the 60th anniversary of the start of regular television weather forecasts. The first of the customary BBC broadcasts was introduced by Dr James Stagg, who was celebrated for persuading General Eisenhower to postpone the D-Day invasion in 1944 because of stormy weather. The best known forecasts, however, are high profile mistakes such as Michael Fish's insistence that no hurricane was approaching in 1987.

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