How Valid Are T.V. Weather Forecasts?

The NY Times has a guest opinion piece about the analysis experiment one man and his daughter performed on their local weather forecaster’s predictions of temperature and precip in the nightly news.

Not surprisingly they found a monkey could probably make better predictions outside of a 3 day forecast, beyond that you might as well throw dice to make the predictions for you; and you might be accurate just as often.

The results were quite enlightening, as were some of the comments of the local meteorologists and their station managers. Here a few of the quotes we received:

“We have no idea what’s going to happen [in the weather] beyond three days out.”

“There’s not an evaluation of accuracy in hiring meteorologists. Presentation takes precedence over accuracy.”

“All that viewers care about is the next day. Accuracy is not a big deal to viewers.”