Boards November forecast comp -- your guess is as good as mine (I hope)

Redsunset

octo wrote: »

Could you explain the sarcasm? I don't get it.

Don't think there's sarcasm there octo.

i think danno's system is powered by Davis so there prob just curious as do any of the stations use similar or same.

MetEireann

Danno wrote: »

Thanks for verifying it ME, as a matter of interest, could you explain further to us the class of equipment used at your AWS sites.

Any chance some of the Davis gear in use?

Hi Danno

We don't use Davis equipment although we occasionally get requests for recommendations of home and school met equipment, and we always recommend Davis as the brand to look for.

I've attached an informal description below from last year describing some of the work our instruments unit do in installing automatic weather stations.

Joe Public

I think it's official this time:-

LATEST IRISH WEATHER REPORTS
ON 28-NOV-2009 for 20:00

Location Wind Weather Temp Humidity Rain Pressure

GURTEEN(A) N 06 SNOW SHOWER 0 99 Trace 991



Knock is lacking a bit on current detail lately so how does it fare with the "M.T. rule book"?

DOCARCH

Gurteen has been reporting snow grains or snow showers most of the day. Because this station is automatic, these are not actually observed conditions. Probably due to fog and/or freezing fog.

Posters in the vicinity elswhere have reported no snow.

octo

DOCARCH wrote: »

Gurteen has been reporting snow grains or snow showers most of the day. Because this station is automatic, these are not actually observed conditions. Probably due to fog and/or freezing fog.

Posters in the vicinity elswhere have reported no snow.

I'd leave it up to the judges, but I wouldn't trust any snow report from Gurteen.

M.T. Cranium

I'll make enquiries, the question is not whether it snowed somewhere or not, but whether a station reported it or not, so it becomes a question of whether Met Eireann accepts any given possible snow report from a station as being real. Part of my thinking about this contest is to choose questions that I can score easily on the fly when the month ends so that I can report scores within 2-3 days, so when I inherited this little project in February I had to get some data confirmed by the kind people at Met E's headquarters, as the questions otherwise would not have been answerable until the detailed monthly weather bulletin came out maybe in April or May (the briefer summary gives me the raw material I need and otherwise I try for questions that I can verify myself from the website on the day of the event.)

With this snow event, I figured there would be a clear-cut case obvious to everyone, but two things have intervened. One is that Knock, a likely suspect for early snow, has stopped reporting weather types on the hourly obs on the website. The other is that we have had a plethora of marginal cases where people saw it snowing here or there and probably near some official weather station, but not one that actually says this on the website. For example, several people yesterday reported snow in Abbeyleix (from memory, this may need correcting) and I would guess that is not a million miles from Oak Park but I didn't see any reports of snow other than Gurteen which I suspect to be just foggy snow grains or freezing drizzle leaving a trace amount -- I am not sure how to classify that kind of marginal event when it's the only one showing up. I am hoping for a more decisive snowfall report today, because from what I recall of the guesses, that would not change any scores very much if any.

Any other opinions and input welcome, of course. This is all for fun and a bit of learning (mostly by me as it would appear from the scores). :cool:

M.T. Cranium

I have the basic numbers from the met.ie website (November monthly summary) and they are:

(1) monthly mean 7.8 C

(2) highest for the month 15.0 C (21st, Casement)

(3) lowest for the month -2.9 C (28th, Claremorris)

I am coming to the conclusion that there were no official reports of snow but I am attempting to confirm this. Until I do that, I won't be able to score the month, so it may be a day or two until the scores appear, not in this thread but in the "annual forecast comp" thread.

M.T. Cranium

After conferring with our mystery guest (Met E) it is now official ... no snowfall reported is the right answer ... probably my bad for choosing such an ambiguous question given the nature of the reporting network vs the Boards observing network, etc etc ... but it's only ten points and I have otherwise managed to avoid ambiguous questions all year so I beg your collective indulgence.

I can now start scoring the November forecasts and the results of that will be found in the annual scoring thread some time later today, I hope.