Do forecasters weather the storm?

[thisss]

Story issue checklist

My pitch was (use the number): #90

• [x] My pitch has been approved (see PITCHING.md)
• [x] My story issue links to my pitch issue
• [x] I have included an update of my visualization/story in a comment
• [x] I have received two comments of peer feedback
• [x] I have received editorial feedback

Most people rely on it -- even if they would't call this information reliable: How good or bad is the weather forecast in reality? I will scrape some information of the five days forecast from major forecast providers in Switzerland and compare it to the measurements five days later.

Possible headlines:

• No clouds on the sky: The forecasters are doing an excellent job
• Don't rely on the forecasters
• Why one forecaster expects rain and the other sun

  Background

  Provider

There are four major provider for forecasts in Switzerland.

• MeteoSchweiz: The Federal Office of Meteorology and Climatology MeteoSwiss is still the most important and biggest provider of weather data in the country. The most important customer is the newspaper NZZ.
• SRF Meteo: Swiss National Television and Radio. Head: Thomas Bucheli.
• Meteotest: Meteo provider from Bern. Most important customer: Somedia, publisher of 'Südostschweiz', 'Schweiz am Sonntag' etc.
• MeteoNews: Customer are most of the Swiss dailies (Blick, 20 Minuten, Tages-Anzeiger, Berner Zeitung) and the private radio stations. Founded by Peter Wick.

  Websites to scrape

• MeteoSchweiz: Complex website hiding the necessary information behind graphs.
• SRF Meteo: Complex website hiding the necessary information.
• Meteotest: Does not have information about how the weather develops during the day.
• MeteoNews: The easiest one to scrape.

  Values to scrape:

Values five days from now all three hours (03:00, 06:00, 09:00 etc.)

• Description
• Temperature
• Wind

  Measured values

Measurements from the Federal Office of Meteorology. Since they are hard to access, we are using the API of Netcetera. Alternative: Our own logger from a previous project.

Reading:

• Hanspeter Guggenbühl: Wie der Markt mit dem Wetter spielt
• Stiftung Warentest: Online-Wetterdienste im Test

[playfairbot]

Hi there, I'm the Playfair Bot!

Thanks for posting your story issue, but would you mind adding editing the original issue to add the first draft of your image? You have my sincere apologies, but it's easier for dumb robots like me when the comments are only used for updates.

Thanks! :pray:

[palrogg]

Your notebook looks very promising! The graph plotting forecast and measures is great, I'm looking forward to seeing values over more than a week. I'm wondering how you plan to calculate how wrong forecasters are. What is the worst:

• announce 10°C every day when the real temperature is 11°C the whole week
• announce 17°C instead of 10°C on Monday, then the exact temperatures the whole week?

[jowang0319]

I would say that this is really a good story!! really looking forward to see the final outcome! Just too many work to do..My suggestion would be like for now, just do whatever you have and get rid of those hard stuff.. And maybe come back later to make the whole project better!

[playfairbot]

Closing since pull request #196 has been accepted

[thisss]