Here's a list of reasons why AccuWeather's new 45 day forecasts are a good idea:
AccuWeather, which could (generously) be described as the Goober Pyle of the weather world, has decided that their forecasts just aren't inaccurate enough. The company announced that they're launching a new 45 day forecast feature:
AccuWeather Expert Senior Meteorologist Alex Sosnowski said that people should not use long-range forecasts as a strict guide but rather look at how the weather patterns evolve.
A typical weather pattern involves a storm crossing the U.S. every three to five days or so, and long-range forecasts can show the trends in precipitation and temperatures as a result.
[...]
Drier and warmer spells versus cooler and wetter periods can be spotted in the AccuWeather 45-Day Forecast. Weather trends can be observed by watching how far above or below normal temperatures are expected to be and by following the chance of precipitation and precipitation amounts.
They're not saying exactly how they're going to figure out when we'll be in a drier/wetter/warmer/cooler period. Unless they've developed weather models far superior to anything being used in the United States or Europe right now, they're making guesses.
Jason Samenow at the Capital Weather Gang sums it up pretty well with one simple quote from meteorologist Dr. Steve Tracton:
Steve Tracton, who holds a Ph.D. in meteorology from MIT, said: “It undermines the credibility of the science of meteorology. There cannot be skill at those ranges – it goes back to chaos theory.”
Anyone who watches even the most accurate weather models (ECMWF, GFS, NAM) knows that model output after about 5-7 days is bogus and should be taken with a grain of salt. On very rare occasions, the long range models actually do peg a weather event pretty well (the GFS latched onto Hurricane Sandy
almost 10 days before it happened, and the SPC was able to use models to predict a tornado outbreak 7 days in advance).
But that's the exception, not the rule. Forecasts get less accurate the further away from the present. 7 day forecasts are very marginally accurate, and anything beyond that is an educated guess that relies more on climatology than meteorology. Something that goes 45 days out is just plain silly, and as Dr. Tracton said, it "undermines the credibility of the science of meteorology."
Their 45 day forecasts are available if you go to AccuWeather's website, plunk in your location, and click "month." Here's their laughable 45 day forecast for Mobile, AL, which is the wettest city in the United States, and reliably has thunderstorms every day from May until September or so.
Their forecasts are just vague enough ("partly sunny, a stray t-storm") that they could get away with saying "well, we were partially right," but just specific enough that people would actually believe them. AccuWeather may qualify the rollout of this feature by saying that it's just meant to show trends and give you an idea of what will happen, but the public doesn't do well with qualified forecasts.
When someone looks at the 45 day forecast and sees "morning showers" in Portland, Maine on September 8th -- 33 days away from today -- they will think that the forecast is meant to be accurate, and rightly so. AccuWeather is presenting "trends" as fact, and they're flat-out lying by pretending otherwise.
AccuWeather has a really bad track record of being on the wrong side of anything -- climate change, politics, weather, you name it -- and their new 45 day forecasts are just piling onto the self-parody.
AccuWeather has a long history of screwing up major forecasts. One of their most glaring screwups was holding out until the bitter end that Hurricane Katrina was going to re-curve and strike the big bend of Florida, completely bypassing Louisiana, Mississippi, and southern Alabama. The image below shows a side-by-side forecast for the same day on August 26, 2005, 3 days before the storm made its second landfall. The left is AccuWeather's extremely inaccurate forecast, the right is the National Hurricane Center's extremely accurate forecast (Katrina went slightly to the left of the NHC's forecast track).
Another one of their "oh my god what" forecasts is their tendency to declare any snowstorm a "Big Daddy" blizzard. If you google "accuweather" and "big daddy" together, you get thousands upon thousands of links showing them declaring that this one really is the Big Daddy.
Their worst transgression, at least in my view, is their active dislike of the National Weather Service. Rick Santorum tried to pass the National Weather Service Duties Act of 2005, which essentially abolished the NWS as we know it by privatizing the service and requiring that they hand over all data to private weather outlets. No more public NWS forecasts. No more tornado warnings from the NWS. No aviation forecasts. Nothing. The only exemption was to allow the National Hurricane Center to continue issuing public forecasts. The rest of it was going to be reserved for private companies.
Like AccuWeather.
Back in 2000, then-VP and now-CEO of AccuWeather Barry Myers donated $4,000 to Rick Santorum's senatorial campaign:
A conservative Republican senator who proposed that federal meteorologists be forbidden from competing with companies such as AccuWeather and the Weather Channel, has received nearly $4,000 from AccuWeather's founder and executive vice president since 2000, RAW STORY has discovered.
Mr. Myers is extremely critical of the National Weather Service, going so far as to slam them for doing nothing but creating forecasts of "warm and sunny." That's utter and complete bull, of course, but don't let that stop you from trying to monetize the public's right to know if a tornado is about to obliterate them.
I've written about Santorum's effort to abolish the National Weather Service here at DailyKos several times. His losing the primaries was one of the biggest bullets we've ever dodged, simply due to his opposition to the public's right to free, life-saving forecasts and weather warnings.
Let me make it clear: AccuWeather has every right to proceed on their foolish effort to write 45 day forecasts. They are a company that exists to make a profit, whereas the National Weather Service is a taxpayer-funded entity whose sole purpose is to serve the public. While it's not in the public's interest, it's in the interest of their bottom line to dupe people into thinking that a 45 day forecast is accurate and based in science.
These fake forecasts are par for the course for AccuWeather. But actual meteorologists and other weather enthusiasts also have every right (if not a duty) to push back against their click-bait and alert the public not to fall for their falsehoods-presented-as-facts they call a long-range forecast. They claim their long-range forecasts are nothing but trends, but they turn around and present these "trends" as accurate, scientific forecasts, and that's beyond wrong.
If it sounds too good to be true, it is.
That goes for weather forecasting as well.