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Are experts evaluating "precision" differently from laypeople? Like, from a layman's perspective, getting the forecasted high and low within 5 degrees and accu
by smeej 2y ago
Are experts evaluating "precision" differently from laypeople?
Like, from a layman's perspective, getting the forecasted high and low within 5 degrees and accurately predicting if it's going to rain (and if so, when) are probably the factors we're evaluating. We don't really notice or care if something like the atmospheric pressure forecast is right or wrong. We care about whether we're well-prepared for the temperature and whether we get wet, and we know from constant experience that the forecast 14 days out can change by 10+ degrees (F) and/or more than 50% chance of rain by the time it becomes tomorrow's forecast, so from our perspective, the forecast is "usually wrong" when it's more than a couple days out.
Are we really, en masse, that wrong about what seems to be constant and universal experience? Or is "precision" measured very differently by professionals than what laypeople mean when they talk about "whether the weather forecast is right or wrong"?
- pintxo 2y agoGiven that the weather models are working on grid sizes 5km and up [1], and we often only get a report for a rough location like a whole city, meaning the prediction needs to be valid for 10s of square km, while our own personal observation range is often just a couple hundred square meters, I am not surprised that my personal sampling of a small area does not match the averaged prediction for a much larger area. But, having said that, temperature predictions seem to be fairly ok up to a week out. Rain is something else, but since we got our dog, I don't care any longer so much. I need to go out anyway ;-) And then I just take a look at the actual rain-radar data for my location to check the actual situation and the outlook for the next hour or so. [1] "the gridboxes in weather and climate models have sides that are between 5 kilometers (3 mi) and 300 kilometers (200 mi) in length" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numerical_weather_prediction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numerical_weather_prediction