Probabilistic forecasts of temperature: measuring the utility of the ensemble spread

Abstract

The spread of ensemble weather forecasts contains information about the spread of possible future weather scenarios. But how much information does it contain, and how useful is that information in predicting the probabilities of future temperatures? One traditional answer to this question is to calculate the spread-skill correlation. We discuss the spread-skill correlation and how it interacts with some simple calibration schemes. We then point out why it is not, in fact, a useful measure for the amount of information in the ensemble spread, and discuss a number of other measures that are more useful.