> The Weather Service also assesses its precipitation forecast, but the patterns are a little harder to unpack — especially with just one year’s worth of data — so we stuck with temperature.
that seems like flimsy justification. I'd love to see the lead plot with precipitation.
For precipitation you will be getting percent chance often with an interval, 10% chance of 0.1-0.25 inches with higher likely in thunderstorms. Also precipitation patterns tend to be much more irregular within small spatial extents. You can asses things like calibration and perhaps take a mean value for there intervals to get point errors. But all of this will make it harder to communicate actual performance.
In the same vein as you, I don't care much if it is raining at my office closer to the mountains but I care about it at home. The distance is ~10 miles and I regularly can see a difference.
https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2024/05/28/weath...
Windy.com allows you to compare models. Apparently weather forecasts accuracy are a popular topic and I didn’t bookmark it.
We have no radar coverage, and the only "official" sensor I know of is at our local airport. It was recently upgraded to be somewhat accurate, but isn't operational about half the time. The most accurate forecast we have is the text synopsis from a forecaster in Pueblo talking about how it "might be stormy in the afternoons this week."
Our nearest city is a 2.5 hr drive, so we're in a pretty big gap of weather coverage!
Anyway - hope someone finds this interesting. I envy those of you with accurate weather! It has been interesting moving out here.
Of course, higher density of sensors would lead to a better fit of the model to the real world, but there would still be no guarantee that the model would reflect the measured values exactly. I found that pretty interesting.
(And it's kind of funny to think about our own consciousness in this way, which seems to work somewhat similarly: we don't experience the actual 'sensor values', but instead we experience the output of a model our brain fits to those inputs.)