Meteorologist Bill Jacquemin Tells Acuracy of Long-Term Weather Forecasts

We do love weather, don't we? Let's face it, we talk about it every day. It is a topic that people discuss when they're trying to find something to talk about because it affects all of us on a daily basis.

It got me thinking, those long-term weather forecasts, how accurate are they? Well, we have our own meteorologist, Bill Jacquemin, so who better to ask?

We do not have the ability, within enough reasonable accuracy, to do long range forecasting.  We can do general trends but that is about it.  The Old Farmer's Almanac claims "many longtime Almanac followers claim that our forecasts are 80% to 85% accurate." This is simply a claim and not the actual accuracy.     John Walsh, University of Illinois Atmospheric Sciences professor emeritus, reviewed the accuracy of five years of monthly forecasts from 32 weather stations around the county and found 50.7% of the monthly temperature forecasts and 51.9% of precipitation forecasts to correctly predict a deviation from average...but their forecasts many times are very general for a large region which would help in their verifying forecasts.

That makes sense to me. A long time ago I had this same conversation with another meteorologist who said to me that "any forecast 10 days out is purely science fiction."