Tom I find my forecast temperatures for this coming Saturday and Sunday are totally unrealistic. WXSim says 11
Hi Stuart,
Do you know if you ran both forecasts with exactly the same data? The changes in the new version shouldn’t have made any noticeable difference in the temperature forecast, but you never know! Meanwhile, reagding the forecxats being so unrealistic, I’m wondering what the contributions from the “learning” parts might be. I’d be interested to see cor.txt and correc.txt, and also to know what happens if you temporarily leave out use of WXSIM-Lite data. Just trying to figure out if some unusual data is “contaminating” the forecast.
Tom
Tom I ran the two versions without re-running WXSimate so yes identical data. Subsequent forecasts have reduced the foretasted temperatures somewhat but still today is showing 14
So now having done some testing I have found that the best forecasts seem to be produced with Lite turned on but if I run with Lite turned off and rely on autolearn biases only the temperatures come out too high in some circumstances. Actually things are not that bad if I turn off autolearn and Lite. Definately seems that for me autolearn on its own can induce problems with temperatures.
Tom I’ve emailed you cor.txt and correc.txt.
Stuart
Thanks for the info, and the files. It definitely appears that WXSIM-Lite helps, as your mean errors went from around 2 degrees (or a little more) to well under 1.5 as WXSIM-Lite “kicked in”. Your bias corrections are not especially large, except that there is a rather “lax” pull towards climatological normals, which is distinctive because it used to be the opposite! That, on it’s own, in warmer than normal conditions, could indeed “bootstrap” the effect and cause slightly warm days to get forecast warmer. It would be suppressed with WXSIM-Lite in action.
One thing that would likely help, if you’re not already doing it, is to check the box in autolearn about including year-old data in the analysis. I think that longer “learning” period would help smooth out these glitches. Let me know what you find!
Tom
Thanks Tom, I’ll try that and keep an eye on things for a while to see what happens.
Stuart
Tom I tried setting the flag to use the older data and then hit the test button and Notepad opens with the data in it, so I close it but the autolearn.exe hangs after that with Not Responding in the title.
Stuart
Update: Not sure if it is hung if the test button does the same thing as the Run Now button. I am running it now and it looks the same. Since I moved WD and WXSim to the smaller PC somethings like this run slower. Would it be possible for the autolearn program to have a progress indicator, maybe just a percentage complete updated in the main window so that we can see it is actually working and not hung. As it is right now once started the program window is empty with Not Responding in the title bar. Mine has been running for about 1 hour 20 minutes so far.
Tom after leaving autolearn to run for hours with no output I cancelled it. I think it has to do with setting that flag for including data from past years as when I turn that off it works doing a test run and wret gets started. I notice that also if I click on view history with notepad it also hangs even with that flag off. So until we can fix this I will leave it without the flag set. I have no idea why it screws up starting Notepad but that does seem to have something to do with it.
Stuart
OK I have sorted part of my issue. For some reason (not clear) autolearn.exe was V3.0 and because that opened Notepad I had a problem. Now I have installed V3.1 the running of autolearn now works providing it does nothing with Notepad.
However I do have a problem where if I hit either button which opens Notepad then the program hangs and does nothing. I can close the Notepad window which shows the data OK but on returning to autolearn.exe I have a blank screen with Not Responding in the title bar. There is obviously an issue with it running Notepad. I am using Windows 7 by the way.
I still feel that as there is nothing in the wret window while it is doing its stuff a progress indicator somewhere would be a good move, otherwise it is only possible to see wret is working by looking at the Windows Task Manager.
Stuart
Stuart,
Thanks for that feedback. I’ve also been bothered by the way wret.exe doesn’t give you a clue sometimes regarding its progress. That’s by no means intentional, it just gets really busy and that form goes blank. Usually, it’s really still working, but just taking a really long time! There are some things I can check about that.
I’ll also see if there’s something about opening Notepad that might cause a problem.
Tom
Thanks for the update Tom. So far I’ve noticed that wret is completely blank on every run I have watched of autolearn so there is not even anything to say it has actually started apart from the window opening. The Notepad thing now in 3.1 is just an annoyance.
Stuart
Since managing to redo the autolearn with the older data included the temps so far in the forecasts in both the 2016 version and the beta have been sensible and very much in line with UKMO.
Stuart