The Independent Variable - Matt Haugland


Tuesday, September 25, 2007

Challening the Humans

After some hard work and long days last week, my weather forecast model is finally running on its own and producing daily forecasts for Cape Hatteras, NC.

Yesterday was the first day of the WxChallenge national forecasting contest, a 7-month competition among weather forecasters. The participants include approximately 1300 students and faculty from over 60 universities across the U.S. and Canada (including my alma mater SJSU and OU). We forecast for a new place every two weeks, starting with Cape Hatteras. Points are awarded according to the accuracy of the forecasts.

I'm not personally a contestant, but my model is participating along with the government models and the National Weather Service. My goals are to beat most of the other models and improve as the competition goes along. But it sure would be nice to be up there with the human forecasters. One of the reasons meteorologists get paid is because they can forecast better than models alone. If the USL Model can play at the same level as some of the best human forecasters in North America, it would be very exciting.


Monday, September 17, 2007

I'm back!

Wow, I can't believe how long it's been since I've posted anything. I will try to keep this updated more often from now on.

If anyone has a suggestion for a topic to post about, I'd be happy to hear it and will probably post something about it. At the moment I can think of about 10 different things I could write about, but they're all related to college football, so it'd be nice to diversify.