Saturday, July 23, 2005

Why Does the LA Times Have Up To THREE Different Temperature Forecasts on Its Web Page?

And this happens on a regular basis.

1. 2-day Forecast for my zip code Downtown
Sat 80°|66°
Chance of a Thunderstorm
Sun 77°|65°

Then - there is my CURRENT Saturday Temperature:

10:47 Downtown 82 degrees

UPDATE! Now 85 degrees - with 80 degree forecast.


2. Five Day Forecast - Saturday and Sunday for Downtown
92° | 68° 89° | 67°

3. Area wide forecast for Saturday and Sunday is below. But if it's either going to be 92 downtown today - or 80 downtown today - as it says above - then it seems very unlikley that it will be in the 70's at the beach or in lower to mid 90's in the Valley and places like Riverside as it says below. Not impossible, but this still seems like an entirely different set of temperatures than the above two that already contradict each other.

Today...Partly cloudy. A chance of showers and thunderstorms this afternoon. Highs from the 70s at the beaches to the lower to mid 90s inland. Chance of precipitation 30 percent.

Tonight...Partly cloudy with a 30 percent of showers and thunderstorms. Lows in the 60s to lower 70s.

Sunday...Partly cloudy with a 40 percent chance of showers and thunderstorms. Highs from the 70s at the beaches to the lower 90s inland.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I just checked my LAT home page and it's the same. The numbers don't match.

Harold

Mediaskeptic said...

Presumably it is the four or five fact-checking editors David Shaw says they rely upon for accuracy which makes them so superior to blogs.

In the grand tradition of the commune mentality at the Times, they simply print them all.

Anonymous said...

I noticed it too. Maybe they're covering their bases. Hope they don't start doing that with news reporting.

Anonymous said...

the weather is created by a partner, like the traffic data provider used by kfwb.com is the same as latimes.com. these services are usually cheap, free or in kind and show it by the measuring glitches. All it takes is for some investor money and the accuracy would be improved a lot, but the investor money is not going to come from tribune corp.