Wildcard Weekend Weather

[Rubes]

On 12/31/2024 at 10:34 AM, leonbus23 said:

 

This is an interesting post. 

 

Like you, I can get a bit annoyed or uncomfortable with "hobbyists" who make claims outside of their professional fields of study and work. For instance, my field (PhD) is Economics, and the amount of misinformation / speculation that proliferate from hobbyists about something like inflation, for example, is frustrating. 

 

Regardless, I wonder, do professional forecasters use numerical models to forecast weather beyond the 96 hours, and if so, are their forecasts reputable in any way, or is the 96 hour limit a rule, per se? Do professional forecasters simply qualify their forecasts beyond 96 hours with a disclaimer? In other words, if numerical weather models aren't worth a damn outside of 96 hours, then what do professional weather forecasters actually do? Or are weather forecasters still searching for the best numerical model? 

 

You don't have to answer these questions, and they may not be reasonable questions (since I know nothing about weather), but it is interesting. 

 

One guy I know does a nice job explaining his snow forecasts by looking at multiple model runs from a series of different formal models. Different models tend to interpret and predict weather patterns differently, while individual runs within each model have great potential variability out beyond 72-96 hours. So what he does is to look at the precipitation averages of the different model runs, then compare the different averages across the models. Once they start to converge around a common theme, then he gets more confidence in predicting what will eventually happen. That convergence typically happens around 96 hours out when it comes to precipitation, but of course you can see common dry patterns across models pretty easily going out further than that.

 

The main disclaimer here is that his job is predicting precipitation amounts (inches of snow and inches of water), so he is focused primarily on that, not things like clouds/sun/temperature/etc.

 

I probably didn't describe that very well, but hopefully that communicated something...

 

Edited Monday at 11:53 PM by Rubes