Even though I hated taking statistics classes in college, I am now an interested consumer of compilations and analysis of data that help to explain our world. One of the best statisticians at doing that is Nate Silver, who runs the FiveThirtyEight web site. Mr. Silver became a public figure after using very successful and innovative techniques to analyze the performance of baseball players and to predict the outcome of elections. For several years he wrote for the New York Times, but now he is associated with of ESPN.
One of Mr. Silver’s latest projects was to study weather patterns, resulting in the article, Which City Has The Most Unpredictable Weather? The title is a little misleading and seems to imply that in those “unpredictable” cities, the professional weather forecasters are more frequently wrong in their forecasts than in other more “predictable” cities. What he actually studied was the degree to which the daily weather in those cites deviated from the average for that day. He should have named the article, Which City Has The Most Variable Weather?
But we’re nitpicking. And in spite of the semantics issue, Mr. Silver came up with some data that could be of interest to wildland firefighters.
In the “predictable” areas, the weather one day is more likely to be similar to that of the previous day, and is not too far off from the average. That is not the case in the “unpredictable” cities.
Variable weather is the bane of wildland firefighters. They don’t like to be surprised by sudden changes in humidity, wind speed, or wind direction.
Generally, Mr. Silver found that weather east of the Rocky Mountains was more variable than in areas west of the mountain range. Rapid City has the crown for the most variable weather.
You should read the article, but below is sample.
Univ. of Washington Meteorology Professor Cliff Mass has an excellent blog about Pacific Northwest Weather where he just wrote about Silver’s analysis.
For those of us who live in Rapid City this is not a surprise