Nah, midlatitude west coasts are worse because of the lack of good data over the oceans. Satellites can't tell you as much as you think, especially in the vert

Nah, midlatitude west coasts are worse because of the lack of good data over the oceans. Satellites can't tell you as much as you think, especially in the vertical direction. Knowing how much water is in a column of air is useful, but not as useful as if you knew precisely which layers it was in. A considerable amount of data in models for California is from observations that were made in China and Japan, that flow with the wind across the Pacific. Or conversely, you can look at it as a data hole that advected across the ocean, too. I'd like to note that of the few blown forecasts we get in Southern California, almost none of them have to deal with the jet stream. It's actually the cut-off lows offshore that don't have steering winds, which makes it difficult to predict where it will go next. The same is true with hurricanes.