IEM Daily Feature
Thursday, 16 December 2010

Computers aren't perfect

Posted: 16 Dec 2010 05:49 AM

Each day, computerized forecast models attempt to predict the weather and produce a lot of numeric output. One application of this output is to apply statistics to these values and attempt to produce more accurate forecasts (called Model Output Statistics [MOS]). The featured chart presents the range of MOS forecasts of daytime high and overnight low temperature for Des Moines from the GFS model along with the actual observations. In general, you can see that the MOS is by no means perfect, so there is currently room for humans to hopefully improve the process.

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Tags:   mos