2004/10/06 by Stephen Jewson, Jewson, Stephen
Earth and Planetary Sciences · Environmental Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Atmospheric and Environmental Gas Dynamics #Atmospheric and Oceanic Physics (physics.ao-ph) #Climate variability and models #FOS: Physical sciences #Meteorological Phenomena and Simulations #physics.ao-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.physics/0410039
arxiv created 2004/10/06 · openalex publication_date 2004/10/06 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The spread of ensemble weather forecasts contains information about the spread of possible future weather scenarios. But how much information does it contain, and how useful is that information in predicting the probabilities of future temperatures? One traditional answer to this question is to calculate the spread-skill correlation. We discuss the spread-skill correlation and how it interacts with some simple calibration schemes. We then point out why it is not, in fact, a useful measure for the amount of information in the ensemble spread, and discuss a number of other measures that are more useful.