ForecastWatch.com April Customer Newsletter
Welcome to the April Newsletter of ForecastWatch.com. You are receiving this email as a subscriber to a ForecastWatch.com product or by having had a demo account created for you. Please see the bottom of this email for instructions on how to unsubscribe from this newsletter.
For the past two years, ForecastWatch.com has been providing weather forecast accuracy data available nowhere else. This data is used by meteorologists, businesses, and individuals every day. But accuracy is just one type of measurement of a weather forecast. The two other important measurements are skill and value. Meteorologists often ask us for skill measurements, and businesses have often approached us noting that while accuracy measurements are helpful, what they also want to know is how valuable forecasts are.
Accuracy measurements compare a weather forecast with what actually happened. Skill measurements not only compare a weather forecast with what actually happened, but with another weather forecast that required no skill to produce. The two "no-skill" weather forecasts that are often used are climatology and persistence forecasts. Climatology forecasts predict that the weather will follow the historical average. If the average high temperature for Chicago on April 20th is 60 degrees, then that is the forecast. A persistence forecast simply takes the weather today and extrapolates it out to the future. If it is 70 degrees today, it will be 70 degrees tomorrow.
ForecastWatch.com is pleased to announce that skill measurements, comparing to both persistence and climatology forecasts, will be available soon. Please contact us at skillbeta@forecastwatch.com if you are interested in beta testing this new feature.
March accuracy data has been audited and loaded for viewing. On average, high temperature forecasts tended to be negatively biased by about 0.61 degrees. Low temperatures also were negatively biased by about 0.23 degrees. To view the March data, as well as year-to-date and historical numbers, log on to http://www.forecastwatch.com
In fact, January, February, and 2005 Year-to-Date data for both high and low temperature and precipitation have also been available. We've been so busy working on new features that we haven't had a regular newsletter out in some time, and we haven't officially announced this. Most of our users have no doubt already noticed this data is available :-) .
As always, let us know what you think at ideas@forecastwatch.com . We welcome your ideas and suggestions to make our services better and more useful.
