Imagine If Your March Madness Picks Were 90% Accurate? – 5 Day Weather Forecasts Are

It is that time of year again and I love it. March Madness is one of my favorite times of year. By now, many of you have probably filled in your brackets for the NCAA tournaments. In my family, we enjoy doing brackets for the men and women. Here’s a question for you. Would you be happy if 90% of your picks were accurate? Of course you would. That’s actually how accurate a 5-day weather forecast is today so enough with the cliche and misguided statements about weather forecast accuracy.

As a meteorologist, I am quite familiar with wisecracks about the accuracy of weather forecasts and ever-present statements like, “It must be nice to be in a profession in which you can be wrong 50% of the time and still get paid (insert eye roll).” As I have written several times, that statement usually tells me more about the person uttering it than my actual profession. The public generally struggles with concepts of probability, uncertainty, and statistics. Yet, many weather forecasts and messaging use them. For example, precipitation is often given in terms Probability of Precipitation (PoP), which according to the National Weather Service website, “Describes the probability that the forecast grid/point in question will receive at least 0.01″ of rain.” During hurricane season, a cone of “uncertainty” and other probabilistic graphics are used to characterize potential locations for storms or their associated hazards. As we saw with Hurricane Ian (2022), there is great confusion about what information these graphics are conveying. Many people erroneously assume that with the “cone,” for example, the storm is predicted to go down the center. Such misinterpretations can have dire consequences.