Forecast Verification at The Weather Company/IBM

Weather forecast verification is a crucial function of any weather forecasting enterprise. Forecast verification allows operational forecasters, meteorological scientists and engineers to monitor forecast quality, identify areas where forecast quality requires attention, as well as provide a capacity to evaluate the efficacy of planned improvements to components of the forecasting process.

At The Weather Company, a multi-year effort is underway to upgrade our verification capabilities to build a configurable, extensible and sustainable verification system. The core design tenet of this system is to enable verification based on easily modifiable configuration files. This system enables us to measure and track our skill across a wide range of our company’s forecasting portfolio, including consumer weather forecasts, aviation, energy, air quality and, eventually, probabilistic forecasts. This talk will provide background on the system design and the data used in the verification process, as well as examples of products developed for the robust range of use cases across IBM’s business lines.