[OC] How reliable is the weather forecast across the US? (to within 3°F)

The National Weather Service’s forecasts are, it turns out, admirably well calibrated46 (figure 4-7). When they say there is a 20 percent chance of rain, it really does rain 20 percent of the time. They have been making good use of feedback, and their forecasts are honest and accurate.

Floehr’s analysis uncovered two big trends in weather prediction. One was toward greater relative accuracy in the private sector—which of course was totally dependent on the National Weather Service data for its forecasts. The other was the astonishing improvement in all weather predictions. The five-day-out forecast in 2016 was as accurate as the

The bigger question is why, if these longer-term forecasts aren’t any good, outlets like the Weather Channel (which publishes ten-day forecasts) and AccuWeather (which ups the ante and goes for fifteen) continue to produce them. Dr. Rose took the position that doing so doesn’t really cause any harm; even a forecast based purely on climatology might

The improvements in weather forecasts are a result of two features of their discipline. First meteorologists get a lot of feedback—weather predictions play out daily, a reality check that helps keep them well-calibrated. This advantage is not available to climate forecasters and is one of the best reasons to be skeptical about their predictions, si

This is the process by which modern weather forecasts are made. These small changes, introduced intentionally in order to represent the inherent uncertainty in the quality of the observational data, turn the deterministic forecast into a probabilistic one. For instance, if your local weatherman tells you that there’s a 40 percent chance of rain tom

The NWS keeps two different sets of books: one that shows how well the computers are doing by themselves and another that accounts for how much value the humans are contributing. According to the agency’s statistics, humans improve the accuracy of precipitation forecasts by about 25 percent over the computer guidance alone,31 and temperature foreca

Weather forecasters and climatologists often find themselves at odds;45 a large number of meteorologists are either implicitly or explicitly critical of climate science. Weather forecasters have endured decades of struggle to improve their forecasts, and they can still expect to receive angry e-mails whenever they get one wrong. It is challenging e