Betting on Rain? the Accuracy and Reliability of Precipitation Forecasts

Like my last article where I used independent forecast accuracy assessment from ForecastWatch to demonstrate that location-specific temperature forecasts are skillful out to around 10 days into the future, this month we use their service to demonstrate the accuracy of rainfall predictions. The data discussed here is based on an average of many different weather service providers’ daily nine-day forecasts collected each day for about 750 U.S. locations during January through November of 2017. These are not “area” forecasts where a successful forecast only means rain fell in a larger area. Rather, these are point-to-point comparisons.

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