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Modern Weather Forecasts Are Stunningly Accurate (theatlantic.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Atlantic: Meteorologists have never gotten a shiny magazine cover or a brooding Aaron Sorkin film, and the weather-research hub of Norman, Oklahoma, is rarely mentioned in the same breath as Palo Alto. But over the past few decades, scientists have gotten significantly -- even staggeringly -- better at predicting the weather. How much better? "A modern five-day forecast is as accurate as a one-day forecast was in 1980," says a new paper, published last week in the journal Science. "Useful forecasts now reach nine to 10 days into the future." "Modern 72-hour predictions of hurricane tracks are more accurate than 24-hour forecasts were 40 years ago," the authors write. The federal government now predicts storm surge, stream level, and the likelihood of drought. It has also gotten better at talking about its forecasts: As I wrote in 2017, the National Weather Service has dropped professional jargon in favor of clear, direct, and everyday language. "Everybody's improving, and they're improving a lot," says Richard Alley, an author of the paper and a geoscientist at Penn State.
Understanding months-long events like El Niño, for instance, has allowed meteorologists to go beyond the seven-day forecast. Alley, the Penn State professor, says that he is awed by the new models. Well-studied features of Earth's climate -- like the temperate Gulf Stream in the Atlantic Ocean -- emerge in computer models, even though developers have written code that only mimics basic physics. We are now surrounded by the products of these miraculous models. In 2009, a back-of-the-envelope study estimated that U.S. adults check the weather forecast about 300 billion times per year. Perhaps in all that checking we have forgotten how strange the forecast is, how almost supernatural it is that people can describe the weather before it happens. More than 1,000 years ago, the Spanish archbishop Agobard of Lyon argued that no witch could control the weather because only God could understand it. "Man does not know the paths of the clouds, nor their perfect knowledges," he wrote. He cited the Book of Job for authority, which asks: "Dost thou know when God caused the light of his cloud to shine? Dost thou know the balancings of the clouds ?"
Understanding months-long events like El Niño, for instance, has allowed meteorologists to go beyond the seven-day forecast. Alley, the Penn State professor, says that he is awed by the new models. Well-studied features of Earth's climate -- like the temperate Gulf Stream in the Atlantic Ocean -- emerge in computer models, even though developers have written code that only mimics basic physics. We are now surrounded by the products of these miraculous models. In 2009, a back-of-the-envelope study estimated that U.S. adults check the weather forecast about 300 billion times per year. Perhaps in all that checking we have forgotten how strange the forecast is, how almost supernatural it is that people can describe the weather before it happens. More than 1,000 years ago, the Spanish archbishop Agobard of Lyon argued that no witch could control the weather because only God could understand it. "Man does not know the paths of the clouds, nor their perfect knowledges," he wrote. He cited the Book of Job for authority, which asks: "Dost thou know when God caused the light of his cloud to shine? Dost thou know the balancings of the clouds ?"
I wish every weather service published a graph that showed the progress of the correlation between their 1 to 7 day forecasts and what actually happened, somewhat like the graph for hurricane tracks in the referenced article. Published confidence levels would also help to know how locked-in a prediction was.
My experience has been that forecasts a day or two ahead are amazingly accurate, but that you can't rely on forecasts a week out for scheduling an important event.
That's about right, 'stunningly accurate' meteorology is not. We are more at 'general idea'. The forcasts in my area see to be *fairly* accurate in terms of trends, but absolutely off base when it comes to predicting what the actual weather will be like on any given day. In practice I don't see that it's all that different from 20 or 30 years ago. It's useful information, yes, but 'stunningly accurate' is a stretch, to say the least.
From what I observe, the weather report is stunningly inaccurate, to the point that I don't even consult it any more except for major trends, and I don't take seriously the idea that something will or won't happen on any given day. I live near Mendocino, CA, and the weather report is all but worthless. Rain pretty much always starts a day earlier or later than is claimed for this location. It was terrible when I lived slightly further inland, in Kelseyville, as well. We had a rise on the property and if I wanted to know what the weather would be even that same day, I had dramatically better results just going up on the little hillock (which, as an aside, is a nascent volcano) and looking in the direction the wind was coming from.
It's actually worse than that, because most of the time they don't even know what the weather is doing RIGHT NOW. They say it's raining, it isn't. They say it's clear, it's raining.
Maybe you get better results inland, when they have all that fancy high-resolution doppler radar to play with, but out here on the northern portion of the left coast the weather report is worthless. Wear layers, and if it even conceivably might rain, bring one that's waterproof.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
People just have to complain. It's their nature. And they use the "Smoking kills you!" "That is not true because my granfather smoked like a chimney and he died at 92" argument where N=1.
-- Cheers!
There are a lot of microclimates around Mendocino. Maybe the weather report just needs to be more granular?
There's a ten-mile stretch of Hwy 101 down here where you can go from dense fog and cool to blazing blue skies and warm and then back again twice.
You are welcome on my lawn.