April 2012 Boards forecast contest

K_1

Maybe the sunshine figure was the average before Valentia became automatic (as that only happened during the month)?!

Another disasterous month on my part anyway.

rameire

Once again I thank all of my family at the gorilla enclosure at Dublin Zoo.
I cannot foresee my streak running on any longer.
This shall be a bad month for me.
Thanks MT for all your hard work, I think I speak for all in thanking you for the amount of work and effort you put into these competitions.

M.T. Cranium

The question was raised about Finner recording 15.7, and this not counting ... my practice is to consult the Monthly Summary and take whatever they say for the monthly extremes (on page one) ... in the past, they have counted Phoenix Park on one similar occasion, discounted it on another, discounted Moore Park last February, and now this situation.

I don't know what their rules are, but my rules are to go with their decision, mostly because it avoids extra work and arguments, two things I try to avoid as much as possible.

In this particular case, it made almost zero difference to the scoring because everyone but redsunset was receiving help from the mercy rule without which most of us would be looking at about half the number of points we actually received.

There is, of course, always the possibility of an error creeping into the Monthly Summary although I have a high regard for the clerical standards of its authors, having done my own fair share of technical publishing over the years.

While on this general subject, my procedure will continue to be to take the data shown for precip and sunshine, not worrying about how or where it was obtained -- if they publish it, I use it for validation.

M.T. Cranium

rameire wrote: »

Once again I thank all of my family at the gorilla enclosure at Dublin Zoo.
I cannot foresee my streak running on any longer.
This shall be a bad month for me.
Thanks MT for all your hard work, I think I speak for all in thanking you for the amount of work and effort you put into these competitions.

No problem, I am surprised to learn how fast evolution takes place, or was it that your family went in the other direction?

Joe Public

M.T. Cranium wrote: »

The question was raised about Finner recording 15.7, and this not counting ... my practice is to consult the Monthly Summary and take whatever they say for the monthly extremes (on page one) ... in the past, they have counted Phoenix Park on one similar occasion, discounted it on another, discounted Moore Park last February, and now this situation.

I don't know what their rules are, but my rules are to go with their decision, mostly because it avoids extra work and arguments, two things I try to avoid as much as possible.

I emailed met.ie and queried Finner's 15.7C and below is the answer I received.

"Finner data is not used in the Weather Summary due to a few reasons.
Over a year ago, it was changed to a Tucson type station, in which we
are currently in the process of monitoring the quality of the data.

Also, before the changeover, there was gaps in the data which means that we are unable to use it for comparison for long-term data use."

M.T. Cranium

Thanks for looking into that ... if we ran into a situation where the scoring was more affected, I might poll the participants in a case where we were all sure that the reading was valid, as I think this case represented (other stations not in our contest were milder) -- but as mentioned, with the minor exception of one forecast getting one additional point, this situation had no actual bearing on the contest scores. We would have been going off the same "mercy rules" regardless.