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Tomorrows Weather? |
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Tomorrows Weather? |
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My project’s goal was to test the accuracy of weather forecasts in Vancouver, BC. I gathered, analyzed and presented my data by myself, and I believe that I am ready to present it to other people at the regional science fair. I chose this topic because I am extremely interested in meteorology as I find the subject fascinating, but I still had some questions about it. My two main questions were how do meteorologists forecast the weather, and how accurate are these forecasts. I have researched and experimented over a 3-week period, and eliminated as many variables as possible by getting the weather results for the previous day from the same source, and by checking the 5-day weather forecasts in a half-hour window from 7:30 to 8:00 daily for 22 days in a row in the month of December 2009. The raw results were then analyzed and averaged to find the average error of a 1-5 day forecast. The results mostly worked with my hypothesis, although some results surprised me and spurred me to investigate more. I believe that the results from this project can be used to determine how much to trust weather forecasts. In my project, there were two sides, the experimental and the research areas. On the experimental side, I tested the accuracy of the 1-5 day weather forecasts. On the research side, I discovered how they forecast the weather. It is done by inputting data from sensors and records of previous weather patterns into a complicated program on a supercomputer, which then uses that data to create a virtual model of future weather. The meteorologists then base their forecasts on this data. Some of the factors used to forecast the weather are temperature, pressure, and relative humidity. This is how meteorologists forecast the weather.