WHEW, FINALLY! OCTOBER DATA AUDITED AND LOADED

That the November newsletter is arriving in December is never a good sign. But the October scores have finally been loaded and audited, as well as year-to-date. Why the delay? The ULCD actuals didn't provide 10/30 or 10/31 data until November 19th. Then, with the Intellovations office being closed for Thanksgiving, auditing wasn't completed until this week. All of us here at Intellovations hope you had an enjoyable holiday, and we apologize for the lateness of the October data.

To view the October data, as well as year-to-date and historical numbers, log on to http://www.forecastwatch.com

CANADIAN CITIES AND PRECIPITATION ACCURACY

We have been very busy here, and are ready to start the Canadian city and precipitation accuracy beta tests. Please reply to this newsletter or support@forecastwatch.com if you would like to participate in either beta test, starting early January.

ForecastWatch is currently collecting nineteen Canadian cities, with more being added soon. You might notice a few "dots" on the accuracy maps in Canada now. They are not added to the numbers, just the graph for added accuracy of the map. You may also notice there is a new path in the URL, "/usa" after "/drilldown" or "/compare". If you have bookmarked URLs please note this change.

Precipitation accuracy measures both icon and text forecast accuracy. Each icon and text forecast is marked as forecasting or not forecasting an event (rain, snow, or thunderstorm), and compared against the actual. From this, hits, misses, and false positives are calculated as well as percent correct versus no-skill (never predicting the event).

FORECASTWATCH FOUNDER HAS PICTURE IN CALENDAR

A picture ForecastWatch founder Eric Floehr took of a brewing thunderstorm made it in as the April 2005 picture in a weather calendar produced by WeatherMatrix (http://www.weathermatrix.net). WeatherMatrix is a worldwide organization of over 9000 amateur and professional weather enthusiasts -- meteorologists, storm chasers and spotters, and weather observers from all parts of the globe.

If you are interested, you may purchase the calendar at:

http://www.cafepress.com/cp/prod.aspx?p=wxmatrix.4472622

Any individual or company renewing their online ForecastWatch.com membership by the end of the year will receive a calendar as a gift as thanks!

Let us know what you think at ideas@forecastwatch.com . We welcome your ideas and suggestions to make our services better and more useful.