Weather Report Card

About / Potentially Asked Questions

I left the car windows open on a hot day in September, 2002. There was no forecast for rain that morning, so I knew my car would be safe. Of course, it wasn't. It bothered me that no one apologized, or even ackowledged this mistake. I wanted to find out how common this was, and how to reward the good forecasters while punishing the bad. The site evolved from there.

Potentially Asked Questions (PAQs)

What's the forecast?

Sorry, no forecast data here. Follow the links. (Almost every mention of a forecaster is a link)

I want to be sure I am not re-publishing any data that belongs to someone else. I hope I am making fair use of publicly available data to provide a review service. But also, my purpose is to encourage good forecasting. I want to drive traffic to the most deserving sites to reward their good work. So please do follow the links.

Where is my city?

I started with the 2000 Census 40 largest U.S. cities, and then I fiddled a bit to get more uniform coverage across the country. I don't plan to be adding any more cities soon. But you can write to me and if enough people are interested, I'd be happy to help.

What about my favorite forecaster, _________?

I'd be glad to add any forecaster that provides free, independent, nation-wide weather forecasts. Many sites that offer forecasts (such as Yahoo, msn, ABC, NBC, CBS, and Netscape) license forecasts from the Weather Channel. Local news stations are likely to get their forecasts from Accuweather.

Why no logos?

Although this site selectively endorses various forecasters, none of them endorses this site.

How does it work?

In the early moning hours, a Perl script runs through all the cities and get the forecasts from the websites. (The impact on the site is minimized by spacing out the requests, and using off-peak hours.) These are stored in a MySQL database until they can be compared with observations. The pages are coded with PHP. The site was developed on an Apple Macintosh iBook.

What is a 'Meta-Forecast'?

It is a forecast of forecasts. The meta-forecast tell you which forecaster will be likely to get the closest to the right temperature for a given day and city. Say you are planning an outdoor event for 3 days from now. Who's 3-day forecast should you trust? Just go to the page for your city, and see the meta-forecast for 3-days out. It should tell you which forcaster to trust for that day and city.

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