Five guidelines for the evaluation of site-specific medium range probabilistic temperature forecasts

Abstract

Probabilistic temperature forecasts are potentially useful to the energy and weather derivatives industries. However, at present, they are little used. There are a number of reasons for this, but we believe this is in part due to inadequacies in the methodologies that have been used to evaluate such forecasts, leading to uncertainty as to whether the forecasts are really useful or not and making it hard to work out which forecasts are best. To remedy this situation we describe a set of guidelines that we recommend should be followed when evaluating the skill of site-specific probabilistic medium range temperature forecasts. If these guidelines are followed then the results of validation can be used directly by forecast users to make decisions about which forecasts to use. If they are not followed then the results of validation may be interesting, but will not be practically useful for users. We find that none of the published studies that evaluate such forecasts fall within our guidelines, and that, as a result, none convey the information that the users need to make appropriate decisions about which forecasts are best.