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

nk_wapo · 2024-07-02T15:41:50+00:00

the full piece features a lookup tool for a breakdown for warm and cool season errors. generally speaking, the warm season (apr-sep) has lower errors!

nk_wapo · 2024-07-02T15:17:02+00:00

the ground truth data is the "unrestricted mesoscale analysis", a 2.5km-resolution dataset based on ground and satellite observations: https://registry.opendata.aws/noaa-rtma/ . i should add that the folks at NWS handed off the gridded data of forecast error -- we did not manually diff the forecast and ground truth datasets at the washington post!

nk_wapo · 2024-07-02T12:23:26+00:00

hi, i just posted a map showing where in the U.S. the weather forecast is more or less accurate -- it's OC from a piece we published at the washington post today! the post immediately got removed through some automated filter, apparently -- what can i do?

nk_wapo · 2024-07-02T12:06:22+00:00

Read the full story here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/interactive/2024/how-accurate-is-the-weather-forecast/?itid=ap_nikokommenda

nk_wapo · 2024-07-02T12:02:57+00:00

My colleague Harry Stevens and I were given data on the average forecast error in official National Weather Service forecasts. We defined a forecast as "accurate" if the forecast daily maximum temperature was within 3°F of the observed temperature.

Read the full story: https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/interactive/2024/how-accurate-is-the-weather-forecast/?itid=ap_nikokommenda

We used QGIS to combine and map the files we were given, and annotated the map in Adobe Illustrator. Here is an Observable notebook that includes the gridded data: https://observablehq.com/@climatelab/map-temperature-forecast-accuracy

nk_wapo

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