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SMHI forecasts 'best-in-test': survey

Geoff Mortimore
Geoff Mortimore - [email protected]
SMHI forecasts 'best-in-test': survey

Despite a recent slew of criticism against the Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute (SMHI) a new survey conducted by Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter (DN) show that the state owned forecasters are still the best source of reliable weather prediction.

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The paper compared the predictions of the four most popular forecasters - SMHI, DMI, Yr.no and Forecas in 19 cities on a daily basis between June 23rd and August 8th.

The forecasts were collated between 11.00 and 13.00 each day taking into account each site’s forecast for the following day.

The three main priorities were temperature, precipitation and thunderstorms and a total of 3,420 reports were collected.

It may not come as a surprise to anyone who has followed the weather debate in Sweden that not one of the four forecasters reached even a 50% success rate.

More surprisingly, after recent reports, it turned out that best-in-test was SMHI, , which managed to get 45% of their forecasts correct. In second place, with a 44% hit rate, came Yr.no, a site run by the Norwegian Meteorological Institute, together with public service broadcaster NRK.

Coming in third was the DMI who only managed a 41% accuracy rate, while Foreca which supplies weather information to Swedish SMHI competition Klart.se, was the only site under 40%, recording a success rate of just 38%.

With the Swedish government looking for an accuracy rate of around 85% there is plenty of room for improvement generally, but as experts pointed out, this summer in particular was very difficult to predict, and results differed considerably even from city to city.

However, the report showed that if you live in Stockholm, SMHI is probably your best bet, while for those on the West coast, yr.no appears to be more reliable.

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