Edition 2026-10-31 The Ledger Archive API RSS Weather Trader
Milepost
1549

TheForecast Post

A chronicle of American weather and climate  ·  Saturday, 31 October 2026

The Ledger

What we said, and what happened

Every forecast this network publishes for a station with an hourly report is compared against that report once the valid time has passed, and the residual is written down. This is the whole file, published whether or not it flatters.

Pairs scored
2,648,940
2026-08-17 → 2026-10-31
Temperature MAE
3.196°F
all leads, both models
Stations
88
with enough samples to rank
Excluded
4
data defects, not misses

Skill by lead

Mean absolute error grows with lead time; the useful question is how fast. Every cell is printed with the number of pairs behind it, because a tidy value drawn from forty samples is not a measurement.

01234512345678day
NDFD NBM mean absolute temperature error, °F

Temperature (°F)

Lead NDFD MAENDFD bias NBM MAENBM bias pairs
Day 1 2.35 +0.01 2.29 -0.01 174,205
Day 2 2.58 -0.04 2.50 -0.06 172,054
Day 3 2.86 -0.04 2.73 -0.09 169,387
Day 4 3.13 +0.07 3.00 -0.10 166,713
Day 5 3.54 +0.05 3.38 -0.10 164,471
Day 6 3.94 +0.05 3.79 -0.06 162,054
Day 7 4.32 +0.20 4.19 -0.02 129,283
Day 8 — — 4.53 +0.01 78,260

6-hour precipitation (in)

Lead NDFD MAENDFD bias NBM MAENBM bias pairs
Day 1 0.02 +0.00 — — 43,443
Day 2 0.02 +0.00 — — 79,468
Day 3 0.02 +0.00 — — 68,573
Day 4 — — 0.02 -0.01 78,707
Day 5 — — 0.02 -0.01 77,679
Day 6 — — 0.02 -0.01 76,454
Day 7 — — 0.02 -0.01 75,152
Day 8 — — 0.02 -0.01 73,828

Where the guidance leans

Mean absolute error says how far a forecast lands from the report; the signed mean says which side. A bias is not an error a reader has to accept — it is one they can correct for. Red runs warm, blue runs cool.

StationBias °F  MAE °Fpairs
CWC +3.58
5.34 1,069
NBG +3.42
3.91 18,005
HII +3.00
4.26 1,371
DLF -1.78
2.72 637
IFP +1.66
2.97 558
HHR -1.61
2.84 18,314
EED -1.52
3.08 17,201
Y49 +1.51
4.82 751
YKM +1.45
4.04 17,675
PDT -1.41
3.44 18,346
GEG -1.25
3.03 18,421
AVL -1.05
2.70 18,415
GRB +1.04
3.52 18,351
MHL +1.01
3.49 17,864
PTD +1.00
3.70 17,924
CNK -0.96
3.94 18,072
PHX -0.95
3.41 18,421
ELP -0.94
2.77 18,421

Showing the 18 most-biased of 88 stations with at least 200 scored pairs.

Our misses

The largest temperature residuals in the file, one row per event. A bad forecast is re-issued every cycle until its valid time passes, so the raw list repeats the same miss a dozen times; the cycles column says how many runs carried it, which is the difference between one bad run and a model that stayed wrong for two days. They are printed for the same reason the rest of the file is.

StationModelValid Worst leadForecast ObservedResidual Cycles
BIHNBM/NDFD 2026-08-26 18:00Z day 7 13.0 90.0 -77.0 1 of 52
BIHNBM/NDFD 2026-09-18 06:00Z day 2 13.0 64.0 -51.0 3 of 57
MVHNBM/NDFD/hrrr/nbm-qmd/rrfs 2026-10-09 18:00Z day 4 35.0 77.0 -42.0 3 of 68
MVHNBM/NDFD/hrrr/nbm-qmd/rrfs 2026-10-10 00:00Z day 4 37.0 78.8 -41.9 16 of 68
EKONBM/NDFD/hrrr/nbm-qmd/rrfs 2026-10-25 00:00Z day 2 13.0 53.1 -40.1 2 of 80
MVHNBM/NDFD/hrrr/nbm-qmd/rrfs 2026-10-09 00:00Z day 3 37.0 69.8 -32.9 1 of 63
MVHNBM/NDFD/hrrr/nbm-qmd/rrfs 2026-10-08 18:00Z day 3 38.9 71.6 -32.7 2 of 65
EKONBM/NDFD/hrrr/nbm-qmd/rrfs 2026-10-24 18:00Z day 2 13.0 45.0 -32.0 2 of 80
MRBNBM/NDFD/hrrr/nbm-qmd/rrfs 2026-10-14 12:00Z day 7 47.0 77.0 -30.0 69 of 74
HVENBM/NDFD 2026-09-01 00:00Z day 8 92.2 62.6 +29.6 57 of 60
SHRNBM/NDFD 2026-09-14 00:00Z day 6 58.2 87.1 -28.9 46 of 60
GLDNBM/NDFD/hrrr/nbm-qmd/rrfs 2026-10-12 18:00Z day 8 58.0 84.9 -26.9 27 of 74

Method, and reach

ASOS reports at :53 and the forecast is stamped on the hour, so a forecast is paired with the nearest observation within 30 minutes and otherwise left unscored.

The ledger begins when the residuals began being written down. The upstream history store keeps a rolling forty cycles, so nothing before that date can be recovered at any price — the table deepens from here rather than reaching backwards.

A residual that cannot be believed is not a miss. 4 rows were excluded here as a data defect rather than a forecast error — a forecast outside the range of anything its own station has ever reported is a broken number, and publishing it as the month's worst miss would blame a forecaster for a decode bug.

Machine edition: /api/v1/ledger.json. Built 2026-10-31T21:25:59Z.