Evaluating Weather Forecasts from a Decision Maker's Perspective

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Raeth, Kornelius, Ludwig, Nicole
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Raeth, Kornelius
Ludwig, Nicole
author_facet Raeth, Kornelius
Ludwig, Nicole
contents Standard weather forecast evaluations focus on the forecaster's perspective and on a statistical assessment comparing forecasts and observations. In practice, however, forecasts are used to make decisions, so it seems natural to take the decision-maker's perspective and quantify the value of a forecast by its ability to improve decision-making. Decision calibration provides a novel framework for evaluating forecast performance at the decision level rather than the forecast level. We evaluate decision calibration to compare Machine Learning and classical numerical weather prediction models on various weather-dependent decision tasks. We find that model performance at the forecast level does not reliably translate to performance in downstream decision-making: some performance differences only become apparent at the decision level, and model rankings can change among different decision tasks. Our results confirm that typical forecast evaluations are insufficient for selecting the optimal forecast model for a specific decision task.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_14779
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Evaluating Weather Forecasts from a Decision Maker's Perspective
Raeth, Kornelius
Ludwig, Nicole
Machine Learning
Applications
Standard weather forecast evaluations focus on the forecaster's perspective and on a statistical assessment comparing forecasts and observations. In practice, however, forecasts are used to make decisions, so it seems natural to take the decision-maker's perspective and quantify the value of a forecast by its ability to improve decision-making. Decision calibration provides a novel framework for evaluating forecast performance at the decision level rather than the forecast level. We evaluate decision calibration to compare Machine Learning and classical numerical weather prediction models on various weather-dependent decision tasks. We find that model performance at the forecast level does not reliably translate to performance in downstream decision-making: some performance differences only become apparent at the decision level, and model rankings can change among different decision tasks. Our results confirm that typical forecast evaluations are insufficient for selecting the optimal forecast model for a specific decision task.
title Evaluating Weather Forecasts from a Decision Maker's Perspective
topic Machine Learning
Applications
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.14779