by J. Eric Bickel

Featured in Nate Silver’s bestselling book The Signal and the Noise, Professor Eric Bickel analyzes over 13 million probability of precipitation (PoP) forecasts provided by The Weather Channel (TWC) in this paper. He found that while TWC performs well overall, for forecasts of less than six days in advance, they tend to overforecast low chances of precipitation and artificially avoid forecasts of 50 percent. He also uncovered motivational bias.

Published in 2011 in the Monthly Weather Review. The full-text version of this paper is available here.