Weather forecasting

Nate Silver, baseball statistician and election polling expert, has an article in the New York Times about weather forecasting and how it has improved much more than almost any other area of prediction:

In 1972, the service’s high-temperature forecast missed by an average of six degrees when made three days in advance. Now it’s down to three degrees. More stunning, in 1940, the chance of an American being killed by lightning was about 1 in 400,000. Today it’s 1 in 11 million. This is partly because of changes in living patterns (more of our work is done indoors), but it’s also because better weather forecasts have helped us prepare.

Perhaps the most impressive gains have been in hurricane forecasting. Just 25 years ago, when the National Hurricane Center tried to predict where a hurricane would hit three days in advance of landfall, it missed by an average of 350 miles. … Now the average miss is only about 100 miles.

The reasons are important in the light of today’s Big Data hype: meterologists have benefited from better input data, but more importantly from better models.  Today’s computers can run more accurate approximations to the fluid dynamics equations that really describe the weather. Blind data mining couldn’t have done nearly as well.     (via)