From Meteorologist Steve Glazier,
This is mainly for personal purposes, but here's a look at how my temperature forecasts stepped up to what actually happened!
On the left you'll find my quirky way of verifying high and low temperatures for the past month. I verify my highs and lows at the Burlington International Airport after I jot down my temperature forecasts for that location. When going through the regional forecast, I make adjustments to that number (add a few, subtract a few degrees) for various locations because of the many microclimates we have here, but I don't verify outside Burlington. I could, but don't have the time for that right now!
February is statistically one of the harder months to forecast. Winter can be much more variable than summer. However February 2013 showed significant improvements over January 2013. In January my error for the 7-day forecast period was about 54 degrees, however for February it was about 48 degrees, so about a 6 degrees improvement there.
Low temperatures were much, much harder to forecast. I kept track of which observed temperatures were farther off and certainly it was the overnight! I made 20 forecasts in February, 14 of which saw larger errors for overnight lows than daytime highs. Only six times were the high temperatures farther off than the lows. This is because the sky can part and it can cool off drastically in northern New England at night. On the contrary, output model numbers sometimes spit out numbers way too cold, so many times I found myself forecasting too cold for overnights.
The trend day by day was pretty steady! I like that part, except for day seven. Notice the large jump in forecast error on day seven, for both the high and low temperature forecast. As for days one through six it wasn't that bad, at least in my opinion.
Heading into the warmer months, my statistics last year show improvements. Generally the warmer, summer months are easier to forecast. However last March had very large temperature swings, of 80 degree heat followed by 30 degree weather the following week. I'll be sure to do one in early April looking back at this month!
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