• therabbithole 3 days ago |
  • therabbithole 3 days ago |
    The author of that article also makes the data and code for some of the interactive data visualizations available via Observable notebooks: https://observablehq.com/@climatelab/map-temperature-forecas...
    • pvg 3 days ago |
      You should still use the original title, some subset of it or representative language from the article. Rewriting them makes sense if they are misleading or clickbait but this one is neither - 'We mapped weather forecast accuracy across the U.S.'.
  • pxx 2 days ago |
    my initial reaction: wait who cares about the temperature forecast? it seems like the easier part and the not particularly-important part.

    > 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.

    • randomsolutions 2 days ago |
      I agree it seems like flimsy justification. But it is also likely harder to assess and communicate. Temperature they get a point prediction for the high and you can easily calculate the mean absolute error.

      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.

      • bastawhiz 2 days ago |
        But temperature error matters a lot less. 82° instead of 87° is "high" error but the practical difference for me is essentially zero. If it's raining when my phone said it wouldn't rain, I have to change my plans.
        • dendrite9 2 days ago |
          I had a friend who did forecasting for a utility and getting the forecast wrong by 5 degree would have been very expensive at the time. I don't remember if it was worse in the summer (AC) or winter. And I wish I could remember if they were buying just electricity or also natural gas

          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.

  • oldmariner 2 days ago |
    I think there was a HN post a few weeks or maybe a month or two ago that showed which weather forecasting service was more accurate in general by comparing predictions to actual. I think the winner was Microsoft's with about a 70% accuracy (with one or two others only a percentage point or two behind). Does anyone else remember this or have the link?
    • gruez 2 days ago |
      Microsoft did weather forecasts?
    • instagib 2 days ago |
      There was another I tried to dig up. It listed how one day forecast was better at x, during the day at y, 2-3 day at z, etc.

      Windy.com allows you to compare models. Apparently weather forecasts accuracy are a popular topic and I didn’t bookmark it.

    • sbankowi 2 days ago |
      I think you are looking for ForecastAdvisor. However depending on your geo, different weather providers will be more accurate than others.
  • ibejoeb 2 days ago |
    The "weather" discussed in this piece is just temperature.
    • downvotetruth 2 days ago |
      Specifically, for the contiguous United States how many days into the future the Weather Service’s forecast of the daily high temperature is accurate within 3 degrees Fahrenheit.
  • mathsmath 2 days ago |
    I find their error model to be off for my location. I'm in a mountain valley in Colorado, and forecasting the weather is like throwing darts at the wall (especially with precipitation).

    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.

    • mckirk 2 days ago |
      Something I learned only recently: Weather forecasts don't actually directly use sensor data. Instead, a physically consistent model is first fitted to all the available sensor data, and then the forecast is made based on the values that model produces. Doing it this way has the benefit that physically implausible sensor readings are given less importance, and the fact that this model can be sampled in regular intervals, whereas the sensors are all over the place (and often moving, e.g. in aircraft, which contribute crucial data).

      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.)