In article . com,
"Jay Honeck" wrote:

"Reliable weather forecasts"?? Where have you EVER seen one of
those? I have been a student of meterology since taking several
courses in college, some 25 years ago, and am here to tell you that
there are NO accurate forecast models that function beyond 12 hours
out.

I've been flying since 1987. In that time I've been paying close attention
to weather forecast. For my area (the northeast) my undocumented
observations (no pun) of the weather forecasts accuracy a

1) 12 hours forecasts have improved. So much so that winds,
visibility, and cloud cover forecasts are close enough for me to make
go/no-go decisions MUCH more reliably now rather than 20 years ago.

2) In 1987, 3-5 day forecasts were a joke to the point where if
rain was forecast in 3 days I could start planning on maybe going
flying.

Weather forecasting isn't perfect, but it sure has improved for
me here in the northeast.

btw - back in 1984 I attended a computing symposium at Goddard
Space Flight Center (if that's now the official name, sorry, but it was
at Goddard). One talk of interest was the computing power needed
for weather forecasting. The supercomputers used for the models
in 1984 required 48 hours of wallclock time to render a 24 hour
forecast. That forecast was only a bit better than 50% (?) correct.
They were estimating the need for several orders of magnitude more
CPU power as well as more efficient models. Well, we certainly have
much more CPU power available now...

--
Bob Noel
(goodness, please trim replies!!!)