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

But the time horizon for accurate forecasts is dauntingly small: the Good Judgment Project found that, while many forecasters were accurate within only about 150 days, its own super-forecasters weren’t confident beyond 400 days.

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

global climate change is an extraordinarily complex development whose eventual outcome depends on far-from-perfectly understood interactions of many natural and anthropogenic processes. As a result, we will need, for decades to come, more observations, more studies, and far better climate models in order to get more accurate appraisals of long-term