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

To illustrate, research shows that weather forecasters tend to predict more accurately than financial analysts do, reflecting both the system and the feedback.4

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

Overall, the predictions for the four cities were reasonably good, but were toward the lower end of Hansen’s range. His global temperature predictions are harder to evaluate because they articulated a plethora of scenarios that relied on different assumptions, but they were also somewhat too high.76 Even the most…

Some highlights have been hidden or

“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.”

There is a point where the rainfall declines dramatically. That’s a line that runs from Minnesota to central Texas. It is the 100th meridian and starkly divides the continent.

The goal of any predictive model is to capture as much signal as possible and as little noise as possible. Striking the right balance is not always so easy, and our ability to do so will be dictated by the strength of the theory and the quality and quantity of the data. In economic forecasting, the data is very poor and the theory is weak, hence Ar

Second, weather forecasts are subject to uncertain initial conditions. The probabilistic expression of weather forecasts (“there’s a 70 percent chance of rain”) arises not because there is any inherent randomness in the weather. Rather, the problem is that meteorologists assume they have imprecise measurements of what the initial conditions were li

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.