Accurate weather forecasts are essential for proactive winter maintenance operations, and departments of transportation are interested in getting the best value for their money. With that intention, the Kansas Department of Transportation obtained weather forecasts from three commercial weather data providers for four selected locations within the state of Kansas. This paper presents a multi-measure quality analysis of those forecasts to identify the most accurate and reliable provider. In doing so, researchers used the prediction of frost events as the performance measure. Several different measures that were capable of quantifying the selected attributes (reliability, accuracy, and skill) were used to evaluate different forecasts for each location and for combined data. Although one provider performed better with the measures analysed, more research is needed before selecting a vendor.
Abstract