Last year the Met Office forecast a "barbecue summer" - only for it to rain through much of June, July and August.

And its talk of a mild winter was followed by the country's worst snowfalls for three decades.

Now the weather service has called time on its much-criticised seasonal forecasts, saying they are too hard to predict.

The Met Office is instead replacing the forecasts with monthly outlooks, updated every week. It said the move followed "customer research".

A statement from the Government-owned organisation said: "In our customer research the public have told us they would like a monthly outlook.

"We have therefore decided to stop issuing a UK 'seasonal forecast' four times a year. Instead, we will now publish a monthly outlook, updated on a weekly basis."

It added: "Although we can identify general patterns of weather, the science does not exist to allow an exact forecast beyond five days, or to absolutely promise a certain type of weather. As a result, 'seasonal forecasts' cannot be as precise as our short-term forecasts.

"The UK is one of the hardest places to provide forecasts for because of our size and location. The weather in temperate climates such as the UK is very hard to forecast much beyond a week."

In April last year, the Met Office famously said the UK was "odds on for a barbecue summer". But while temperatures were 0.6C above average during June, July and August, UK rainfall reached 318.5 mm or 40% more than average.

Later in the year forecasters also claimed there was just a one in seven chance of it being cold between December and February, only to confirm earlier this week that the UK winter was the coldest since 1978/79.