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Spring Quarter 2012 |
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Forecasting is optional and for extra credit. Students who submit a minimum of 18 forecasts will have extra credit points added to their final as outlined at the bottom of this page. There are 23 weekdays during the period of the forecast competition during which you may submit a forecast. This is Monday through Friday ONLY, including Memorial Day, May 28. Maximum possible extra credit is 10 points added to the final.
You will be entering your forecast for maximum and minimum temperature and precipitation at Seattle-Tacoma Airport. Observations are taken over a grassy runway, with an elevation of 452 feet above mean sea level.
The time period you are forecasting for is a 24 hour period beginning at local midnight of the day following that on which you make your forecast (as long as the forecast is made prior to the 10PM deadline). For example, a forecast entered at 8:30 PM (local) on April 24, will be verified against observations made between midnight and 11:59 PM April 25. The maximum temperatures often occurs an hour or two before sunset and the minimum temperature often occurs near dawn. Remember, however, that fronts and changing weather can result in the maximum and minimum temperatures occurring at any time during the day. It is possible, for instance, for the maximum temperature to occur at night and for the minimum to be reached at mid-day due to the passage of warm and cold fronts. This type of occurrence is infrequent in the Pacific Northwest but occurs more often than one might expect in other parts of the nation.
A few days before you begin forecasting (when instructed), you need to sign up for the competition. When you do this, you will provide your student identification number, a pseudonym (nickname) and a password. This will allow you to enter forecasts anonymously and prevent other people from entering forecasts for you. It also allows everyone to check each other's progress without revealing true identities.
In addition to the forecasts of your fellow students, forecasts from the National Weather Service (NWS), forecasts based on computer models, the class consensus (average), persistence (today's weather used as tomorrow's forecast) and climatological values will also be entered. These should provide a benchmark for how you are doing.
The forecasts from computer models are labelled as MOS. This stands for Model Output Statistics, but you don't need to worry about what that means. GFS-MOS is based on a global model that runs around 7 PM PDT each night. We are entering values from the forecast generated the evening before the day you forecast, so the forecast is usually about 36 hours old for the minimum and 48 hours old for the maximum temperature. On average the GFS-MOS should be the worst model forecast. The forecasts from the NWS are from the mid-afternoon update usually issued around 4 pm local time.
The objective is to have the lowest overall score. Your score will only count toward extra credit if you have entered at least 18 forecasts by the end of the contest. This means you can skip no more than 5 days of the 23 contest days.
In the beginning, all forecaster's scores appear on a red background. Once forecasters have entered the required minimum number of forecasts to obtain extra credit on the final (18), their scores appear on a green background.
Submissions are scored as follows:
Bluesky scores as follows:
10 points for maximum temperature:
(56 - 54) X 5 = 10
55 points for minimum temperature:
(34 - 45) X 5 = 55
10 points for precipitation.
Extra credit will
be awarded as the highest of: