Weather

Percent chance of rain

percentage of rain on a given day, data from over 112 years. Click for a bigger image I was playing around my visualization software and graphed the historical likelihood of rain in Seattle over the last 100 years. (I have a way’s to go until I can do something as totally cool as this.) As […]

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Winter Solstice

This is the most depressing time of year to be in the Pacific Northwest. Officially, the length of the day will be 8 hours, 26 minutes, down from 15 hours, 59 minutes exactly six months ago. Seven and a half hours’ difference.. it’s like another day to work with. For comparison, my folks in Texas

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Weather Forecasting

When I was obsessing about the weather forecasts earlier this year, I read a lot on basic weather theory, hoping to better understand forecasting methodologies and, specifically, how all these intelligent people arrive at different results. Once this mystery was solved, I thought I’d tackle macroeconomic theory (ha ha!). I went to my library and

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Spring is almost here!

Well, not really. But this week has had some mighty fine weather. I was pretty happy after Wednesday’s glorious ride into Seattle to scope out a project for Cascade Bicycle Club’s Bike to Work Month. Today was even better: I folded my bike, stashed it in the back of the plane, and took a quick

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Weather Rodeo Results

Weather Rodeo v2 was my first attempt to construct a fitness function for the forecasters’ prediction accuracies. There were a couple of surprises: First, KIRO TV 7, winner of round one, fared the worst this time around because of the penalties for bad predictions, e.g., predicting sunny when it’s actually overcast with rain. The second

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Happy Groundhog Day

The length of winter was revealed this morning by Punxsutawney Phil. Outlook: six more weeks. It occurred to me that I should add him as one of my weather forecasting sources, but he’s doesn’t do five-day forecasts, especially in the Seattle area. The next Weather Rodeo will commence with forecasts rendered on Wednesday evening between

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