ForecastWatch.com will be unavailable for periods of time between 8pm this evening and 8am tomorrow morning, EDT. Additionally ForecastWatch.com will be unavailable this weekend. Both outages are for maintenance and software updates.

There will be a few visible changes with the updates:

1. For precipitation statistics, equitable threat score (ETS) is replacing ORSS (odds-ratio skill score). ETS is a more generally used and known statistic. There is little difference in the scores, but ETS seems not to be as likely to go negative when the forecasted event is very rare. However, like ORSS, ETS can only be equitably compared with other forecasters with similar bias. Both ORSS and ETS favor wetter forecasts generally. The maps will still show ORSS, but will be converted as the precipitation stats are re-aggregated.
2. There has been a slight change in URL structure, specifically, the precipitation page URLs will now use "precip" rather than "precipitation". This will only be an issue if you have saved any URLs.
3. "MyForecast" is now referred to as "CustomWeather". CustomWeather's weather website is myforecast.com, however "MyForecast" was occasionally confused as meaning MY forecast. This will eliminate that confusion.
4. "Accuweather" is now properly capitalized as "AccuWeather".
5. The map legend text is higher resolution and precipitation maps will be continuous-gradient (like the temperature error maps) rather than indexed.
6. A bug with password reset has been fixed.

The precipitation re-aggregations mentioned last month in order to remove the rain/snow distinction was put on hold due to some database performance issues. With this update those issues have been addressed and the re-aggregations will resume.

For our subscribers of Canadian sites, we will be addressing a few data issues with observations from EC as well as increasing location coverage over the next month.