By Doug Schneider
Here's how well I did with the forecast for the Bathurst 12 Hour (I'm doing the temperature verification in Fahrenheit because it is a finer scale than Celsius) :
Here's how well I did with the forecast for the Bathurst 12 Hour (I'm doing the temperature verification in Fahrenheit because it is a finer scale than Celsius) :
There's a weather station located just 1.2 km north of the Mount Panorama Circuit pit lane, on the Charles Sturt University campus, and data at the site is easily accessible on the Australia Bureau of Meteorology website. It's always nice to have a weather station that is very close to a track to give representative data to verify the forecast against.
Mount Panorama had beautiful weather for the entire event, and compared to last year's scorcher, temperatures were much more pleasant. The models never wavered in their depictions of the weather pattern through the week leading up to the race, so I was pretty confident in the forecast and never had to make big changes from one update to the next. That's a good feeling.
I did have a chance of showers mentioned on Saturday, and while there was no rain recorded at the track or the weather station that day, there were scattered showers around the Bathurst area that just avoided the track. As I mentioned in the posts, showers developed over the Blue Mountains and were able to track into the Bathurst area in the afternoon. So the 30% to 40% chance of showers in the forecast was fairly representative of what happened. A little more cloud cover than expected on Friday and a little less cloud cover on Saturday were probably why I missed the high temperatures those days by 3 to 5 degrees.
Overall, I'm happy with how the forecast turned out, especially considering the challenge of forecasting for the Southern Hemisphere.
I did have a chance of showers mentioned on Saturday, and while there was no rain recorded at the track or the weather station that day, there were scattered showers around the Bathurst area that just avoided the track. As I mentioned in the posts, showers developed over the Blue Mountains and were able to track into the Bathurst area in the afternoon. So the 30% to 40% chance of showers in the forecast was fairly representative of what happened. A little more cloud cover than expected on Friday and a little less cloud cover on Saturday were probably why I missed the high temperatures those days by 3 to 5 degrees.
Overall, I'm happy with how the forecast turned out, especially considering the challenge of forecasting for the Southern Hemisphere.
