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

Figure 6.2 Annotated line graph with forecast

Obviously, a forecast without a time frame is absurd. And yet, forecasters routinely make them, as they did

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

“We might have trouble forecasting the temperature of the coffee one minute in advance, but we should have little difficulty in forecasting it an hour ahead.”

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

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

An idea pursued at Maryland and a couple of other places was to run the weather model over and over, with different initial weather conditions. Alter the conditions slightly, in reasonable ways. Vary the wind speed, or barometric pressure at 10,000 feet, or the ocean temperature, or whatever seemed reasonable to vary. (How you did this was its own

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