Wunder Cast - Forecast Competition Blog

Let me first thank all the participants for taking part in the first of its kind competition that allowed everybody from professional meteorologists to people who think meteorology is voodoo to test their forecasting skills. I hope everybody at least learned something throughout the competition. We will now take a considerable amount of time off before starting the next competition. I hope you will all return for the next installment.

Congratulations to LamontSoM11 for his overall win. He one in KPHL and KOMA and was able to stay stable in KMIA for the overal victory. mobal looked like he had the overall victory underwraps going into KMIA, but his liberal use of 0 and 100 for the precip values really did him him.

Generally in these kind of competitions if you finished ahead of consensus, you have done rather well. Think of it this way...consensus is the average forecast. That is, everybody got together and made a forecast with all inputs taken into consideration. So if you do better than this vast amount of information, then you did really well. Twelve people did better than consensus.

The CCF was the best performing in terms of automatted participants, with MRF coming in second. Consensus did best in KPHL, where it placed 8th. This means that it took one hell of a forecast to beat consensus. One funny note is that persistence placed 17th in KMIA, meaning that if you just forecast what happened yesterday for today, you would have done pretty well.

Thank you all!