Public Forecast (ideas for my Meteorology Class at DSC)

Saturday 12/22/2012

I have an idea for those who want to learn more about forecasting. I may not have all the time in the classroom I need to teach the skill, but if I do it online, then I will have more time.

My idea and end goal is to have a blog where I can post a weather discussion (my own or from the NWS), and then allow a discussion on the weather. There will also be a survey to take each participator's forecast, then find a statistical forecast and compare it to the NWS forecast and the actual values. (Possibly I could use HTML coding and create a form to submit to) Theoretically, I could also keep this running for the general public to contribute to.

This would be a great blog or program to keep running, but it may take a while to develop. So, in the meantime, I can use Florida Online to do the job. I can set up a discussion every day, and require at least 5 replies on the discussions. I can also have a series of "quizzes" each day for students to enter their forecasts. The statistical values would then be calculated automatically. There would be 5 forecasts required for the course. The required portions would probably be later on in the semester, after we finish talking about the basics (chapter 8), and we'll probably be able to include one lecture on forecasting (chapter 9).

UPDATE: 12/23/2012
Lars just informed me of a way to easily do this on a blog and on Google+ using Google docs. I think this will actually do very well for my class and eventually for the public. I can easily set up each forecast to allow 5 entries: today's high, tonight's low, tomorrow's high, chance of precipitation, and if it is for credit in my DSC meteorology class, one last space to enter a CARS ID (or an ID of my choosing).