"J C-W" wrote in message
news

"Franz Heymann" wrote in message
...
The following is true (I'm a sad soul). At the beginning of the year I
did
a
small experiment noting forecasts and noting what actually happened
for
my
city over 3 weeks (I got bored after 3 weeks). I collected each
forecast
for
the following day only, no long range stuff. The three sites were
Yahooo,
UK Weather.com and the Met Office. Yahoo had something like a 30%
accuracy,
UK Weather.com were about 40% I think and the Met Office came out tops
with
60 something %. I wish I'd kept the figures now. My conclusion was,
it's
best to look out of the window :-) And... my goodness are they getting
paid
for this??!

That means that Yahoo was far and away the best forecaster. If you
rigorously stuck to the opposite of what they said, you would have had
70%
accuracy.

Franz

Er... somewhat flawed logic

Of course. Did you miss the tongue pushing against my cheek?

- just because it's right for 30% of the time,
does not mean that the opposite is true for 70% since there are so many
meteorological variables (i.e. the opposite could be just as wrong).

That is also somewhat flawed logic. If it is right for 30% of the time then
it quite certainly has to be wrong for 70% of the time, unless there are
illogical situations which are neither right nor wrong
{:-))

What
this thread tells us is that for all the technology and super computer
models being used, the predictions are fundamentally flawed because they
rely on basic physical principles and ignore chaos theory, quantum
mechanics
and the insight of a deity.

I doubt if quantum mechanics and a deity play major roles. The main bugbear
is the fact that the weather equations are chaotic.

The suggestion of looking out of one's window
or using the old fashioned techniques (pine cones, 'red sky at night...',
feeling in the bones) may prove just as useful and accurate!

I once had a mammoth South African calendar with one page per day. Each
page had a scene with the caption "It's a sunny day today". It was correct
for
approximately 95% of the days of the year. I never even owned a raincoat
until I went to University.

Franz