Verification of Short-Range Weather Forecasts (A Survey of the Literature)† I.

Abstract

In a survey of literature on short-range forecasting 69 items were found which contained discussions of verification. Of these only 55 seemed of sufficient importance to warrant summarization. The articles ranged in length from less than one page to nearly a hundred pages. Only 22 of the articles summarized were written in English; 26 were in German, 3 in French, 2 in Dutch, 1 in Russian, and 1 in Danish. The date of the earliest article was 1884, and that of the most recent one, 1943. Half of the articles were published before 1913, the other half after 1920. The introductory part of this article is intended to provide a bird's eye view of the writings on verification of short-range forecasts and should serve as a guide to the more detailed summaries, which appear chronologically arranged in Section II. The summaries are numbered from 1 to 55, and these numbers are used whenever reference is made in the introduction to the summaries. It should be understood that the sole purpose of the summaries is to spare future investigators the trouble of having to locate and consult every article. However, the summaries will merely serve to indicate whether or not a jriven article is relevant to the problem under investigation; they are not to be taken as complete abstracts of the contents.