Forecast Evaluation and Decision Analysis

METR 5803

Univ. of Oklahoma School of Meteorology

(Revised 17 January 2013)

Introduction

Background

Historical perspective

· The Farmer's Almanac problem

· The Finley Affair (Murphy, A. H., 1996: The Finley Affair: A signal event in the history of forecast verification. Wea. Forecasting, 11, 3-20.)

Why do verification?

· Evaluate system

· Identify problems

· Improve forecasting without science

Logistical details

Projects

Statistical sidebar

Probability

Important notions

· Robustness

· Resistance

· Expected value

Summary measures

· Location

· Spread

· Skewness

Parametric statistics

· Moments

· Generating functions

· Mean, variance, standard deviation, sample skewness coeff.

Non-parametric

· Distributions-oriented

· Quantiles

· Median

· IQR

· MAD

· Yule-Kendall index (skewness)

Measures of association