RULES

All forecasts must be submitted by 5:00 PM on the Friday. Forecasts may be submitted anytime before this deadline; just change the date field, which defaults to the next closest date, to that which you wish to forecast for.

Missed forecasts get you the average error of all participants for that day (which is much worse than consensus).

Maximum 3 missing forecasts per quarter; total of 6 missing forecasts during year. If more, you will be disqualified from award consideration.

Forcast verification is from Saturday 556 UTC to Sunday 556 UTC (0600Z-0600Z) for METAR sites and from Saturday at 0100 to Sunday 0000 local time for Mesowest sites during the normal forecasting periods (excludes playoffs).

Temperature verification will be scored by the mean absolute error multiplied by 3.

Precipitation category verification will be scored by the absolute difference between the forecasted and observed values, squared. Precipitation categories may vary by site as noted on pull down menu on forecast submission page. You may submit any category from 0 to 10, however, only categories of 0, 5, or 10 can verify as correct. Any value in between will accumulate error points, but may limit your chances of a large error.

There will be two normal periods in which all forecasters can compete, and one playoff period.

The total forecast contest score will be a running total of the error points accumulated over the entire forecast period. A contestant with a lower score will have a higher rank in the contest.

Playoffs:

The top four forecasters from the fall and spring period will be entered into the playoffs. If a competitor is in the top four for both seasons, wildcard competitors will be entered into the playoffs until there are 8 people competing.

Wildcard players will be selected from random; however, a person with a higher total rank (from both seasons) will have a better chance of being selected as a wildcard.

Playoffs will be a single elimination round tournament. Players will be seeded based on rank; high ranking players will be initially competing with lower ranking players.

Playoffs will feature a different forecast site for each round, with sites being randomly selected from a list of sites that have the most forecasting error in the United States.

Each round will consist of two forecasts. The forecaster with the lowest running score from each branch will move on to the next round.

Awards:

Awards will be given out at the Department Dinner. The winner of the playoffs will not be announced until that time.

Return to main contest page.