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When you're learning to forecast, you need a systematic procedure to follow. It's difficult to know where to start, it's hard to remember everything to look for, and you're never sure you've considered all the key ingredients.
That's why, for the purposes of the Weather Challenge, I am proposing this procedure for making your daily forecasts. Click on the image to have a copy available for reference while you proceed through this module. There are five parts to the checklist:
- The Big Picture: understanding what's going on on the large scale - the progression of weather systems across the map and how they might be affecting the forecast city.
- Recent history: understanding what's happened recently at the forecast site, and why it happened the way it did.
- Clouds and rain: Clouds and rain affect the temperature, but the temperature doesn't often affect the clouds and rain. So you must start with your precipitation forecast; you must have an idea of the evolution of clouds and precip before you can forecast temperatures.
- Temperature: based on all the available evidence and your idea of how the weather will evolve, what are the most likely maximum and minimum temperatures? Don't neglect the possibility that the max or min may occur at the beginning or end of the period rather than at the normal time.
- Compare with guidance: how do your numbers compare with forecasts from other sources? If they disagree significantly, you must either have more faith in your own numbers or understand why they are different. So far, we have compared with the National Weather Service zone forecasts, but later we will also compare with computer forecasts.
In this module, you will follow me around as I make forecasts for two locations in the United States. You will see how the forecast process checklist is applied in a variety of situations. At crucial points, I will instruct you to develop your own ideas about what will happen with the weather. At the end, you will find out whether your forecast was better than my forecast.
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