Nate Silver (of 538) has some space that he’s dedicated to this effort in The Signal and the Noise. Randal Olson’s reproduced some of that related to current-day abilities, which show that we’re currently able to give better-than-random results for a few days in advance, but not much better after that. And, unsurprisingly, data beats expertise when it comes to accuracy.
A good deal of the data-collecting tools have been developed or implemented relatively recently, and that seems to correlate with improvements to short-term forecasting, to the point where a five-day forecast in 1991 was roughly as likely to be accurate at a three-day forecast in 1981.
They’ve improved enough that they can probably be trusted to determine whether you should bring an umbrella tomorrow, but the historical numbers and especially expertise-based numbers were inaccurate enough to explain the origin of the meme.
Nate Silver (of 538) has some space that he’s dedicated to this effort in The Signal and the Noise. Randal Olson’s reproduced some of that related to current-day abilities, which show that we’re currently able to give better-than-random results for a few days in advance, but not much better after that. And, unsurprisingly, data beats expertise when it comes to accuracy.
A good deal of the data-collecting tools have been developed or implemented relatively recently, and that seems to correlate with improvements to short-term forecasting, to the point where a five-day forecast in 1991 was roughly as likely to be accurate at a three-day forecast in 1981.
They’ve improved enough that they can probably be trusted to determine whether you should bring an umbrella tomorrow, but the historical numbers and especially expertise-based numbers were inaccurate enough to explain the origin of the meme.