Winter’s finally over: How did the NOAA Climate Outlook do?
“Last November, I wrote a post discussing the Climate Prediction Center’s (CPC) temperature and precipitation outlooks for winter (December 2014 – February 2015). Since we’re now into March, it seems appropriate for me to look back and see how they did. In that post, I discussed the probabilistic nature of the outlook, and what the favored categories (above-, near-, and below-average) for winter temperature and precipitation were judged to be.
As a reminder, and if you haven’t memorized that post, the outlooks favored above-average temperatures in Alaska, much of the West, and also in northern New England, and below-average temperatures in the south-central and southeastern parts of the nation.
For precipitation, we favored wetter-than-normal conditions across the southern tier of the nation, extending northward along the East Coast, as well as in southern Alaska, and drier-than-normal conditions in central Alaska, parts of the Pacific Northwest and around the Great Lakes and Ohio Valley. So how did we do?”