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FORECAST FLAKES
Snowfall Meteograms · one storm, one place at a time

Case study

One place at a time

The maps show the whole country at one moment. This shows one place through the whole storm: what the blend said would fall in each six hours, how wide its own range was, how the forecast moved from one run to the next, and what the snowfall analysis measured. Use and to walk the storm track.

Six-hour snowfall, and the range around it
blend, 6 h 25th–75th 10th–90th 50th percentile climate day (24 h to 12Z)
Every run's cumulative forecast, against what fell
the selected run every other run observed, stepped by climate day
The forecast against its own initialisation CLICK A RUN

When did we know enough? DECISION HORIZON

How to read it. Each row is a threshold somebody acts on. Every dot is one model run, placed at its lead time, filled if that run expected the threshold to be reached. A red ring means that run got the answer wrong. The green band and its flag mark the lock — the earliest run after which no later run changed its mind, and the mind it had was the right one. That is the honest answer to “when could we have acted”, and it is a different question from “what was the error”: a forecast that is right from four days out and one that is right only in the last twelve hours score the same on error and differently here.

Run by run in
The honest caveats

A grid cell is not a gauge. Both the forecast and the analysis are 2.5 km averages sampled at the city's coordinates, so a valley town and the ridge above it can share a number that suits neither exactly. These are not station observations and should not be read as one.

The range stops at f054. Past two and a quarter days the blend publishes one snowfall number and nothing about its spread. Where a run shows no band, that is the product ending, not the uncertainty ending.

A negative lead is a nowcast. Runs initialised after the window opened are still shown, because watching a forecast settle once the storm is underway is part of the story — but they are not a forecast of the whole event and their totals cover only what was still to come.