Forecasts don't always work out. Our new tool helps show when a snow forecast has the best chance of falling apart.
Let's be honest: Weather forecasts don't always hit the mark.
That's not from any lack of effort on meteorologists' part -- weather forecasting is incredibly complex and difficult.
Forecasters have to make a prediction regardless of how certain they are of what will ultimately happen. Uncertainty in forecasts is something meteorologists have struggled to communicate for ages, especially with snowstorms.
With New Jersey potentially facing its first major snowfall of the season, NJ Advance Media has created a tool that makes it easier.
Today we're introducing the Bust-O-Meter. The Bust-O-Meter is a measure of the confidence weather forecasters have in their prediction, put on a scale of 1 to 100. Find our methodology and our new tool below.
Methodology
The Bust-O-Meter uses a weighted average of six locations in New Jersey for any given storm event. We take the official forecast of these locations and measure how far they are from the best and worst case scenarios published by the National Weather Service alongside the official forecast.
The wider the range between the official forecast and the best and worst case scenarios, the less confidence there is in the forecast. Generally, these ranges come down as the storm event gets closer and confidence increases. We put our measure on a 100 point scale to simplify it for readers.
This is experimental. It will be tweaked and expanded as time goes on.
So, without further ado, the Bust-O-Meter for the storm that is predicted to hit Wednesday night into Thursday morning: