Thursday, December 18, 2008

Mercer Island’s most accurate weather forecaster

Surrounded by Water took a walk to see how the island is coping with all this snow today, but some of us are wondering when it will let up.  Weather forecasts are so unreliable we think it’s almost a waste of time to pay attention to weather reports.  Don’t the forecasters get graded on accuracy?

Yes they do and evaluation service Forecastadvisor says the best weather source is MyForecast, with 80.61% overall accuracy last year.  Weather Channel is so close that you might as well assume they’re the leader, since you’ve probably heard of them more.

But on days like yesterday, when the forecast assumed tons of snow that never materialized, we really care about the accuracy of precipitation forecasts, and there Accuweather is tops.

ForecastAdvisor summary of Mercer Island forecasts

Of course, some days you can just look at the weather and judge for yourself:

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Well Richard if you're going to throw a nice easy softball like that, I'm going to take it. I just can’t get too worried about climate change when the best our Nation’s technology and brain power can produce is an 80% accuracy rate for predicting a 1 – 7day forecast.

Richard Sprague said...

Hey, if you can't trust the experts, who can you trust?