Weather Banter - View Single Post

Stephen Stein · May 15th 04, 01:37 AM posted to ne.weather.moderated

On 5/14/04 11:28 AM, in article ,
"The Artist Formerly Known As Your Highness"
wrote:

On 14 May 2004 10:17:58 -0400, Joseph Bartlo
wrote:

Regardless, my primary purpose for that post is to note how the hourly
precipitation probabilities in TWC forecasts are misleading.

You should write TWC about this and see what they say
[other comments deleted]

I won't comment about the rest of the Artist's post, but I actually would be
curious to see what TWC would say about this.

But Joseph, I wonder when you question the accuracy of hourly forecasts.
I'd expect them to be better about things like precip prob at a well-known
location like Gettysburg. But if you're talking about the hourly forecasts
given for a specific zipcode, I wouldn't expect much in the way of accuracy.
Especially for a place like the Poconos, where I'm sure there's a large
variability throughout the area.

I live in Acton MA, but as far as I know, the TWC forecasts are all based on
Bedford, which is about 10 miles closer to the coast. I don't know about
other weather stats, but I know that snow amounts can vary tremendously
between those locations.

To me, these forecasts are like extra decimal digits beyond the limits of
significance in a physics problem answer, when you really don't have enough
data to make a prediction beyond regional daily conditions. In that way, I
think that publishing hourly predictions is misleading. Perhaps TWC should
limit itself to what it can reasonably predict.

- Steve Stein

--
This article was auto-posted by the ne.weather.moderated Weatherbot
program. The author is solely responsible for its content.

ne.weather.moderated FAQ/Charter: http://www.panix.com/~newm/faq.txt
ne.weather.moderated moderators e-mail:
(Please put "wx" or "weather" in the subject line to avoid the spam block.)