| --- |
| license: cc-by-4.0 |
| pretty_name: CastCheck — U.S. station-level temperature forecast verification |
| tags: |
| - weather |
| - forecast-verification |
| - climate |
| - time-series |
| - ecmwf |
| - gfs |
| - graphcast |
| - pangu-weather |
| - aifs |
| size_categories: |
| - 1M<n<10M |
| --- |
| |
| # CastCheck — daily station-level verification of public weather forecasts |
|
|
| Independent, automated verification of **raw** 2 m temperature forecasts from operational NWP |
| (ECMWF IFS HRES, NCEP GFS) and AI models (ECMWF AIFS Single; NOAA/CIRA operational runs of GraphCast, |
| Pangu-Weather, FourCastNet v2 and Aurora from both GFS and IFS initial conditions) at 23 |
| U.S. first-order stations — 22 major airports plus New York Central Park. The headline metric is the instantaneous 2 m temperature at 00/06/12/18 UTC |
| against the ASOS observation at the same instants; daily extremes are published as secondary |
| variables, both like-for-like and against the NWS Daily Climate Report (CLI). |
|
|
| - Site and permanent links: https://castcheck.zifanzhang.com |
| - Methodology v0.3.1: https://castcheck.zifanzhang.com/methodology/ |
| - Code: https://github.com/ZzZTripleZzZ/castcheck |
| - Archived: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22212363 |
| - Updated daily by an automated pipeline. Last push: 2026-10-19 17:35 UTC |
|
|
| ## Fairness statement |
| These are raw model outputs at 0.25°, without MOS, bias correction, or downscaling. They are not |
| equivalent to the post-processed products end users receive, and scores here understate operational |
| forecast quality. Every model is sampled at the same four instants, and the headline metric compares |
| those samples with observations at the same instants, so no part of it depends on a model's own |
| diurnal amplitude. The extremes verified against the CLI report (`tmax_cli`, `tmin_cli`) carry a |
| sampling penalty whose size does differ between models, so they are secondary and are never used to |
| rank (see methodology §2.3). |
|
|
| ## Files (schema v0.3) |
| - `data/forecast_values/model_id=*/year_month=*.parquet` — extracted station values (long format) |
| - `data/truth_instant/year=*.parquet` — observed 2 m temperature at 00/06/12/18 UTC, with QC flags |
| - `data/truth_daily/year=*.parquet` — NWS CLI/CF6/observation truth with first-final policy and QC flags |
| - `data/daily_forecasts/model_id=*/year=*.parquet` — derived sampled/native daily extremes per lead day |
| - `data/scores/latest.parquet`, `data/scores/pairwise_latest.parquet` — published aggregates with bootstrap CIs |
|
|
| ```python |
| from datasets import load_dataset |
| ds = load_dataset("castcheck/temperature-verification", data_files="data/scores/latest.parquet") |
| ``` |
|
|
| ## Sources and licences |
| ECMWF Open Data (CC-BY-4.0) · NOAA/NCEP GFS (public domain) · NOAA/CIRA AIWP (open data; cite |
| the AIWP BAMS paper) · NWS climate reports (public domain) · Iowa Environmental Mesonet AFOS archive. |
| ECMWF data is © ECMWF, licensed under CC-BY-4.0 and used unmodified apart from interpolation to the |
| station; ECMWF does not endorse this work. This dataset is released under CC-BY-4.0; please cite as |
| *CastCheck, methodology v0.3.1, doi:10.5281/zenodo.22212363, |
| https://castcheck.zifanzhang.com (accessed YYYY-MM-DD)*. |
|
|
| ## Models |
| - `ifs_hres` — ECMWF IFS HRES |
| - `aifs_single` — ECMWF AIFS Single |
| - `gfs` — NCEP GFS |
| - `graphcast_ifs` — GraphCast (IFS initial conditions) |
| - `graphcast_gfs` — GraphCast (GFS initial conditions) |
| - `pangu_ifs` — Pangu-Weather (IFS initial conditions) |
| - `pangu_gfs` — Pangu-Weather (GFS initial conditions) |
| - `fourcastnet_ifs` — FourCastNet v2 (IFS initial conditions) |
| - `fourcastnet_gfs` — FourCastNet v2 (GFS initial conditions) |
| - `aurora_ifs` — Aurora (IFS initial conditions) |
| - `aurora_gfs` — Aurora (GFS initial conditions) |
|
|
| ## Stations |
| - `KNYC` New York Central Park (40.783, -73.967, 46.9 m) |
| - `KEWR` Newark Liberty (40.682, -74.169, 4.9 m) |
| - `KPHL` Philadelphia Intl (39.873, -75.227, 2.1 m) |
| - `KTTN` Trenton Mercer (40.276, -74.816, 64.0 m) |
| - `KBOS` Boston Logan (42.361, -71.011, 6.1 m) |
| - `KDCA` Washington Reagan (38.848, -77.034, 4.0 m) |
| - `KATL` Atlanta Hartsfield (33.640, -84.427, 313.0 m) |
| - `KMIA` Miami Intl (25.791, -80.316, 3.0 m) |
| - `KORD` Chicago O'Hare (41.980, -87.904, 203.0 m) |
| - `KMSP` Minneapolis-St Paul (44.883, -93.229, 256.0 m) |
| - `KDFW` Dallas-Fort Worth (32.897, -97.022, 164.9 m) |
| - `KIAH` Houston Bush (29.984, -95.361, 27.1 m) |
| - `KAUS` Austin Bergstrom (30.183, -97.680, 148.1 m) |
| - `KSAT` San Antonio Intl (29.533, -98.464, 246.0 m) |
| - `KMSY` New Orleans Intl (29.993, -90.251, 0.9 m) |
| - `KOKC` Oklahoma City (35.389, -97.600, 394.1 m) |
| - `KDEN` Denver Intl (39.847, -104.656, 1647.1 m) |
| - `KPHX` Phoenix Sky Harbor (33.428, -112.003, 339.9 m) |
| - `KLAS` Las Vegas Harry Reid (36.072, -115.163, 664.5 m) |
| - `KLAX` Los Angeles Intl (33.938, -118.389, 38.1 m) |
| - `KSAN` San Diego Lindbergh (32.734, -117.183, 4.0 m) |
| - `KSFO` San Francisco Intl (37.620, -122.366, 3.0 m) |
| - `KSEA` Seattle-Tacoma (47.445, -122.314, 130.1 m) |
|
|
