SF-ROCKS Research Projects
Comparison of Five Weather Forecast Methods at Four California Locations
Faculty Advisors: Dave Dempsey and Oswaldo
Garcia
Graduate Advisor: Elizabeth Frieberg
In this project we compare five methods of forecasting maximum and minimum temperature and probability of precipitation at four California locations: California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, Oakland airport, Sacramento airport, and Lake Tahoe airport. The five methods are applied to make 24-hour forecasts twice weekly from August 18 to December 2, 2003.
The five forecast methods include:
- Persistence. A persistence forecast assumes that tomorrow’s
weather will be the same as today’s.
- Climatology. Our climatology-based forecasts use weather conditions
for the day at each location averaged over the 30-year period from
1971 to 2000.
- Official National Weather Service (NWS) forecasts. We use the
official NWS forecasts for Oakland airport, Sacramento airport,
and Tahoe airport. For The California Academy of Sciences (CAS)
we use the NWS’s new Prototype Digital Forecast for the CAS’s
latitude and longitude.
- Individual student forecasts, mad by four 10th grade students
from San Francisco’s Burton High School. They consulted the
most recent meteograms, satellite images, soundings, synoptic analyses,
and computer model forecasts, as well as climatology, persistence,
and NWS forecasts.
- A consensus of student forecasts, comprising the average of
the four student forecasts.
We calculate forecast error by squaring the difference between a forecast and the verifying observation, and compare the forecast methods based on these errors.