castcheck/temperature-verification

CastCheck — daily station-level verification of public weather forecasts

Independent, automated verification of raw 2 m temperature forecasts from operational NWP (ECMWF IFS HRES, NCEP GFS) and AI models (ECMWF AIFS Single; NOAA/CIRA operational runs of GraphCast, Pangu-Weather, FourCastNet v2 and Aurora from both GFS and IFS initial conditions) at 23 U.S. airport stations, scored against the NWS Daily Climate Report (CLI).

• Site and permanent links: https://castcheck.zifanzhang.com
• Methodology v0.3.1: https://castcheck.zifanzhang.com/methodology/
• Code: https://github.com/ZzZTripleZzZ/castcheck
• Updated daily by an automated pipeline. Last push: 2026-08-31 07:27 UTC

Fairness statement

These are raw model outputs at 0.25°, without MOS, bias correction, or downscaling. They are not equivalent to the post-processed products end users receive, and scores here understate operational forecast quality. Daily extremes are computed identically for every model from the common 6-hourly instantaneous samples (see methodology §2.3).

Files (schema v0.3)

• data/forecast_values/model_id=*/year_month=*.parquet — extracted station values (long format)
• data/truth_daily/year=*.parquet — NWS CLI/CF6/observation truth with first-final policy and QC flags
• data/daily_forecasts/model_id=*/year=*.parquet — derived sampled/native daily extremes per lead day
• data/scores/latest.parquet, data/scores/pairwise_latest.parquet — published aggregates with bootstrap CIs

from datasets import load_dataset
ds = load_dataset("castcheck/temperature-verification", data_files="data/scores/latest.parquet")

Sources and licences

ECMWF Open Data (CC-BY-4.0) · NOAA/NCEP GFS (public domain) · NOAA/CIRA AIWP (open data; cite the AIWP BAMS paper) · NWS climate reports (public domain) · Iowa Environmental Mesonet AFOS archive. This dataset is released under CC-BY-4.0; please cite as CastCheck, methodology v0.3.1, https://castcheck.zifanzhang.com (accessed YYYY-MM-DD).

Models

• ifs_hres — ECMWF IFS HRES
• aifs_single — ECMWF AIFS Single
• gfs — NCEP GFS
• graphcast_ifs — GraphCast (IFS initial conditions)
• graphcast_gfs — GraphCast (GFS initial conditions)
• pangu_ifs — Pangu-Weather (IFS initial conditions)
• pangu_gfs — Pangu-Weather (GFS initial conditions)
• fourcastnet_ifs — FourCastNet v2 (IFS initial conditions)
• fourcastnet_gfs — FourCastNet v2 (GFS initial conditions)
• aurora_ifs — Aurora (IFS initial conditions)
• aurora_gfs — Aurora (GFS initial conditions)

Stations

• KNYC New York Central Park (40.783, -73.967, 46.9 m)
• KEWR Newark Liberty (40.682, -74.169, 4.9 m)
• KPHL Philadelphia Intl (39.873, -75.227, 2.1 m)
• KTTN Trenton Mercer (40.276, -74.816, 64.0 m)
• KBOS Boston Logan (42.361, -71.011, 6.1 m)
• KDCA Washington Reagan (38.848, -77.034, 4.0 m)
• KATL Atlanta Hartsfield (33.640, -84.427, 313.0 m)
• KMIA Miami Intl (25.791, -80.316, 3.0 m)
• KORD Chicago O'Hare (41.980, -87.904, 203.0 m)
• KMSP Minneapolis-St Paul (44.883, -93.229, 256.0 m)
• KDFW Dallas-Fort Worth (32.897, -97.022, 164.9 m)
• KIAH Houston Bush (29.984, -95.361, 27.1 m)
• KAUS Austin Bergstrom (30.183, -97.680, 148.1 m)
• KSAT San Antonio Intl (29.533, -98.464, 246.0 m)
• KMSY New Orleans Intl (29.993, -90.251, 0.9 m)
• KOKC Oklahoma City (35.389, -97.600, 394.1 m)
• KDEN Denver Intl (39.847, -104.656, 1647.1 m)
• KPHX Phoenix Sky Harbor (33.428, -112.003, 339.9 m)
• KLAS Las Vegas Harry Reid (36.072, -115.163, 664.5 m)
• KLAX Los Angeles Intl (33.938, -118.389, 38.1 m)
• KSAN San Diego Lindbergh (32.734, -117.183, 4.0 m)
• KSFO San Francisco Intl (37.620, -122.366, 3.0 m)
• KSEA Seattle-Tacoma (47.445, -122.314, 130.1 m)