April 2020 Boards weather forecast contest

Yep, the thing about late penalties is that they are less punitive than redistribution of what could be advantage gained with access to later guidance (and the results already known to date). Depends on the actual case and how much a person might have consulted any recent model runs in making their late forecast. I've had cases where I needed to reduce MIN or MAX scoring over top of late penalties to equalize the scoring because some late entrants knew an exact value they thought would qualify.

But I suspect looking back over actual scoring and late penalties, there is no actual advantage gained in statistical terms and the penalized scores probably fall at random against non-penalized scores. So in that sense the penalty reverts to being punitive rather than just a fairness redistributor. Not that familiar with the advantage myself as never late (for some reason I always remember the contest deadline).