I Tracked Every Snow Day Forecast Against What Actually Happened for One Winter (Here's Who Was Right)
It's 5:45 in the morning and I'm standing in the kitchen with three phone tabs open, a cold cup of coffee, and a seven-year-old already dressed for school just in case. The National Weather Service says two to four inches. AccuWeather says four to six. The guy on the local news, the one with the mustache and the laser pointer, says "a coating to an inch, mainly north of the river." Not one flake has fallen yet. I have to decide in the next twenty minutes whether to pack a lunch or not, and none of these three sources agree with each other.
That morning wasn't unusual. It was just the first time I got mad enough to do something about it.
The winter before, I'd taken a full sick day from work because a forecast promised a foot of snow and a blizzard warning. We got an inch and a half. School stayed open. I burned a PTO day on nothing. So this past winter, I decided to stop guessing and start keeping score. Every storm, every prediction, every actual outcome, written down the night before and checked again the next morning. Fourteen events later, I have real numbers for my district, not vibes.
Why I Didn't Just Trust the Apps Like Everyone Else
Most advice out there tells you to "check multiple sources" and "use your judgment," which is true but useless. Nobody tells you which source is actually worth checking, or by how much each one tends to miss, or in which direction. That's the gap I wanted to fill for my own street, not for some national average that doesn't care about my specific school district's plow schedule or its superintendent's risk tolerance.
So here's what I did. Starting in November and running through the end of March, I logged three forecasts every time snow was mentioned as a possibility for the next school day. I wrote down what each source said the night before, around 8 or 9 p.m., since that's when most parents are actually checking. Then I measured what fell and recorded what the district decided to do.
How I Actually Measured the Snow
This part matters, because a sloppy measurement makes the whole log worthless. I used a flat wooden board set out on our back deck, away from the house and any overhang, since snow drifts and melts differently near walls. I cleared it after each storm so I was never measuring accumulated totals from two events stacked together. I read it every morning at 6:30, right before the district's decision usually came through, using a ruler pushed straight down to the board surface, not the ground, since grass and dirt throw the number off.
I didn't measure at the same time as the forecast cutoffs, and that's worth admitting up front. A storm that was still falling at 6:30 obviously wasn't done yet. For those cases I took a second reading later and noted both numbers, but the 6:30 figure is what I used to compare against the district's actual call, since that's the number a parent would have in hand when deciding whether to leave for work.
The Three Sources I Tracked, and What Each One Is Actually Good At
Before the data, a quick note on what these three sources even are, because they're built differently and that changes how they fail.
| Source | What it's built for | Update frequency | Where I checked it |
|---|---|---|---|
| NWS point forecast | Government model output for a specific lat/long | Several times a day | weather.gov, zoomed to my exact house |
| AccuWeather | Proprietary model blend, app-based, broad zip code | Continuous | Their app, default location setting |
| Local TV meteorologist | Human forecaster reading models plus local terrain knowledge | Evening broadcast, one shot | 11 p.m. news segment |
The NWS number comes from a model with no local knowledge of my hill, my tree cover, or my specific ten-block radius. It's honest but generic. AccuWeather leans toward covering itself, from what I saw, giving ranges wide enough that they're rarely dead wrong but rarely precise either. The TV meteorologist is the only one of the three who has actually driven my roads and knows which neighborhoods get missed by the plows first. That local knowledge showed up in the numbers.
The Season in One Table
Here's the full log, condensed. "Predicted" is the snowfall range each source gave the night before. "Actual" is what my board measured by 6:30 the next morning. "Correct call" means the source's prediction would have led to the same open/delay/closed outcome the district actually chose.
| Date | NWS predicted | AccuWeather predicted | TV met predicted | Actual measured | District did | NWS correct? | AccuWeather correct? | TV met correct? |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nov 28 | 1-2" | 2-3" | 1" or less | 0.75" | Open | Yes | No | Yes |
| Dec 9 | 3-5" | 4-6" | 3-5" | 4.25" | 2-hr delay | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Dec 15 | 2-4" | 1-2" | 2-3" | 1.5" | Open | No | Yes | No |
| Dec 22 | 5-7" | 6-9" | 6-8" | 6.75" | Closed | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Jan 4 | 1" or less | 2-3" | 1" or less | 0.5" | Open | Yes | No | Yes |
| Jan 11 | 3-4" | 3-5" | 4-6" | 5.5" | Closed | No | No | Yes |
| Jan 19 | 0.5" or less | 1" or less | Flurries | 7.25" | Closed (late call) | No | No | No |
| Jan 27 | 4-6" | 5-7" | 5-6" | 5.75" | Closed | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Feb 3 | 2-3" | 1-2" | 2-4" | 2.25" | 2-hr delay | Yes | No | Yes |
| Feb 10 | 1-2" | 2-4" | 1-3" | 1.75" | Open | Yes | No | Yes |
| Feb 16 | 3-5" | 4-5" | 3-4" | 3.5" | 2-hr delay | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Feb 24 | 0.5" or less | 1" or less | 1" or less | 0.25" | Open | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Mar 3 | 5-8" | 6-8" | 6-9" | 7" | Closed | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Mar 14 | 2-3" | 3-4" | 2-3" | 2.5" | Open | Yes | No | Yes |
Fourteen storms. That's small as far as sample sizes go, and I won't pretend one winter in one town proves anything about your district. But it's real, it's local, and it's more useful to me than any national accuracy study, because it's measured against the exact hill my kid's bus climbs.
What the Numbers Actually Say
Once I added it all up, here's where each source landed.
- NWS called the correct outcome 11 out of 14 times, about 79%, and its snowfall totals were off by an average of 1.1 inches, usually on the low side.
- AccuWeather called the correct outcome 8 out of 14 times, about 57%, and missed by an average of 1.9 inches, almost always predicting more snow than actually fell.
- The TV meteorologist called the correct outcome 12 out of 14 times, about 86%, missing by an average of 0.9 inches.
Two things surprised me. First, the local TV guy beat both algorithmic sources, and by enough that it wasn't luck. Second, AccuWeather's tendency to run high wasn't just a one-off complaint I'd read in some forum. It happened in 9 of the 14 storms I logged. If you're the type who packs a bag and calls off work the moment an app throws a scary number at you, AccuWeather in my location was the source most likely to send you into panic mode over a storm that never fully showed up.
The Night Everyone Got It Wrong
January 19th deserves its own paragraph because it's the storm that made all three sources look bad at once.
The night before, NWS had us at half an inch or less. AccuWeather said under an inch. The TV meteorologist used the word "flurries," full stop, no accumulation mentioned. Nobody flagged this as a closure risk. School stayed on the normal schedule, buses ran their routes at the usual time.
By 7 a.m., my board had 7.25 inches on it, and it was still coming down sideways. What happened is a pattern anyone in lake-effect country will recognize: a
That single storm dragged down every source's accuracy number for the season. It's also the clearest argument I can make for not fully trusting any single forecast the night before, no matter how confident it sounds. Lake-effect bands, and similar narrow snow squalls in other regions, are the blind spot every model shares.
So Which One Should You Actually Trust?
Based on my season, if I had to pick one source to check the night before making a decision, I'd check my local TV meteorologist first. They had the best hit rate and the smallest average miss, and I think it's because they've physically driven the roads my kids' buses use and know which spots ice over first.
But the smarter move, the one I actually use now, isn't picking a favorite. It's watching for agreement. When NWS and the TV meteorologist land within a inch of each other, that number has been reliable for me almost every time. When AccuWeather is the outlier, running noticeably higher than the other two, I now treat that gap as a flag to lower my confidence rather than a reason to prep for a bigger storm. And when all three sources are calling for almost nothing, like they did on January 19th, that's exactly when I now check the radar myself before bed, because that's the pattern that burned me hardest.
None of this replaces your district's own decision. Superintendents are weighing things I can't measure from my back deck: road salt supply, bus driver availability, wind chill on top of snow totals, whether an ice layer is hiding under the powder. A forecast telling you three inches is coming doesn't tell you whether your specific district closes for three inches or shrugs it off. That part you have to learn from your own district's history, which is really just this same tracking exercise applied to school closures instead of snowfall.
What I'm Doing Differently Next Winter
I'm keeping the log going, because one season isn't enough to trust fully, and a second winter will tell me whether this year's pattern holds or whether I just got a weird sample. I'm also adding a column I skipped this year: wind speed at 6 a.m., since a few of the "close call" decisions this winter seemed to hinge on drifting more than raw accumulation.
If you want to run this yourself, you don't need anything fancy. A flat board, a ruler, and a spreadsheet with six columns will get you there. Start the log now, even mid-season, because three or four storms in is enough to start seeing which of your local sources actually earns your trust and which one is just good at sounding confident.
Comments
Post a Comment