Verification of the Ohio 3 to 5 Day Forecast for 1988

In the fall of 1987, a Cleveland area newspaper wrote an article on 3 to 5 day forecasts. The paper obtained the 3 to 5 day forecasts from several TV stations and the National Weather Service and they did a simple verification on each product. The verification included an evaluation of the temperature forecasts and whether rain occurred when a chance of precipitation was mentioned. According to the results, there was no clear winner because the forecasts were only accurate about 50% of the time. Since the newspaper may have caught the product during a bad month, I conducted another verification project by using Ohio data for calendar year of 1988.