Weather forecast skill comparisons at a location in the Midwest United States

Abstract

This paper presents the results of a forecast skill score comparison for the popular two semester weather forecast game played at University of Missouri, Columbia, MO, United States, for a total of 106 days, during the autumn 2006 and winter 2007 semesters. A relatively less experienced/first time student forecaster (SF) skill, based upon the funnel approach to weather forecasting, is compared with the then state-of-the-art mesoscale operational numerical weather prediction (NWP) model outputs and the observations. Several measures of the forecast skills are employed to illustrate the intercomparison of the different aspects of performance of the game players for a conventional forecast game setup in an educational environment, after paying particular attention to the associated sampling uncertainty in the analysis of the forecast game. Bootstrap resampling based confidence intervals are computed and compared for the SF and NWP model forecasts and the observations to quantify the relative accuracies of the forecasts. The SF performed quite comparable to the NWP models, and better than the climatology and the persistence, for the next-day forecasts of temperature and precipitation, when the forecast skill scores of the game players were averaged over the period of the forecast game. These observations support the judgement that the contribution of human forecasters, even in the contemporary era of progressively improving and fully automated NWP model outputs, remained a crucial one.

Daily atmospheric circulation patterns for Catalonia (northeast Iberian Peninsula) using a modified version of Jenkinson and Collison method

“…This classification therefore provides a straightforward tool for daily use by forecasters as a first step for developing a weather forecast (Snellman, 1982;1982;Lanicci, 2003;Athar and Sara, 2014). This classification could also be used for downscaling future climate forecasts, in particular studying the temporal evolution of the relative frequencies of various synoptic types and thus the potential influence of circulation changes on climate change in contrasting micro-environments.…”

“…Although an increase in computation power has facilitated the use of high-resolution atmospheric circulation models to examine local climate problems, this does not displace the need for synoptic meteorology. Still today, forecasting routines usually include a synoptic point of view (Athar and Sara, 2014) and the general recommendation in forecasting protocols is to downscale predictions from synoptic to local scales, to take interactions between scales into account (Snellman, 1982;Lanicci, 2003).…”

Error characteristics of temperature forecast in Finland for the period 1979–2011 in relation to various weather patterns

“…Doswell 2004;Sills, 2009) and forecasting performance comparisons between human forecasts and automatic Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) output (e.g. Athar and Sara, 2014;Novak et al, 2014).…”

Surface temperature forecast skill comparison for the west coast of Saudi Arabia

“…Although various aspects of temperature forecast verification geared towards assessing responses of widely varying interest sectors of general public are discussed for different locations (Brooks et al, 1997), there is no such study available for SA. Also, unlike the customary tradition in North America, of having city forecast competition/game as a part of under graduate/graduate course work (see, for instance, Driscoll, 1988;Athar and Sara, 2013), there is no such established custom in SA universities. The present analysis may thus serve as a reference document to possibly initiate such a practice in university education in SA and/or at general public level (for the quality assessment of commercial weather forecast, see, for instance, Mailier et al, 2008).…”