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Comment by bcardarella | Hacker News Reader

Not in Boston, they've become far far worse. I presume because of climate change but still has become frustrating in recent years.

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> they've become far far worse

Where are your data to back this claim up? And over what time horizon?

Which forecasts have become worse in Boston? 24 hour, 5 day, all of the above? This is surprising to me, because even when traveling across the USA, I've found the predictions to be very useful.

All forecasts. I race sailboat around Boston and they've been absolutely horrible. Not just for extreme weather events but even regular weather wind direction is off by nearly 180 degrees in direction regularly, wind strength is regularly wrong too. The predictions overemphasize rain events in the 10 day forecast during the Summer that nearly always completely go away and they fail to predict rain and lightning events. That's overing multiple weather models at various resolutions.

why would you think that short term weather forecasts are somehow affected by climate change?

I don't think OP i correct that the forecasts there are less reliable, but I would gather that:

More warming == more energy in the system.

More energy in the system -> more volatile weather.

More volatile weather -> harder to predict weather.

You gotta keep up with the narrative bud, it's not "weather isn't climate" anymore; as long as the weather seems unusual to adults, it's evidence of climate change.

But don't forget! That doesn't mean nice weather is counter-evidence of climate change. Nice weather is /also/ evidence of climate change, because it's merely the lull before the weird weather.

Got it yet?

Climate models are based upon historical data. Recent climate change has changed weather patterns where historical data being used is making predictions less reliable.

No, climate models are the same sorts of physics-based simulations as weather models.

Isn't GraphCast now state of the art for weather forecasting? It outperforms physics-based simulations over the relevant time horizon.

"Outperforms" is a stretch; its skill is on par or slightly exceeds the state-of-the-art NWP models currently run today, but you as an end user would not notice the difference between GraphCast and the ECMWF HRES. Furthermore, raw model guidance is almost always passed through a blending and statistical post-processing process alongside competitor models to fine tune the forecast, and there are no rigorous benchmarks of whether or not the inclusion of GraphCast improves this process because very few groups are running it operationally.

Also, it's worth noting that GraphCast's outputs are a tiny subset of what we would traditionally forecast as weather parameters. You can't out-perform a competitor on a task that you aren't solving!

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