Five days before the recent snowstorm rocked the Mid-Atlantic region, the ECMWF weather model had forecast more than 30 inches for portions of Delaware, coastal Maryland, and southern New Jersey. The model had overestimated snowfall by up to a factor of three.
My criticism of the model will likely not anger many in the political arena. Why not? Because, as we are often told, weather is not climate. Weather is very difficult to forecast because it is highly variable, and weather models can and often do make bad forecasts – particularly for long-range predictions – because model errors grow over time. By contrast, apparently, climate is very easy to forecast, and thus the dire prognostications made by climate models cannot be questioned. (Never mind those dates activists often set for climate “tipping points” pass without event.)
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