The title speaks for itself. This book comes highly recommended.

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Product Description

Weather and climate extremes can significantly impact the economics of a region. This book examines how weather and climate forecasts can be used to mitigate the impact of the weather on the economy. Interdisciplinary in scope, it explores the meteorological, economic, psychological, and statistical aspects of weather prediction. Chapters by area specialists provide a comprehensive view of this timely topic. They encompass forecasts over a wide range of temporal scales, from weather over the next few hours to the climate months or seasons ahead, and address the impact of these forecasts on human behavior. Economic Value of Weather and Climate Forecasts seeks to determine the economic benefits of existing weather forecasting systems and the incremental benefits of improving these systems, and will be an interesting and essential text for economists, statisticians, and meteorologists.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1244165 in Books
• Published on: 1997-06-13
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 240 pages

Review
"...this book has a strong, quantitative flavor oriented to statistical approaches and methods for verifying forecasts and for optimal forecast evaluation procedures. For those specializing in forecast evaluations with an economic decision-oriented flavor, this book will be very useful." Stanley A. Changnon, Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society

"...this book contains a lot of highly useful, basic information and concepts, especially on forecast quality assessments, and points out ways to translate these assessments into `value' concepts." Elmar R. Reiter, Meteorology & Atmosphere Physics

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Customer Reviews

THE Reference
The book represents the best reference for "distributions oriented" verification of probabilistic forecasts. Developed and described in the context of meteorological forecasts, the DO paradigm is robust, and has ubiquitous applications, when one recognizes that EVERY forecast is inherently based on a conditional probability distribution.

The focus on meteorological forecasts does not make applications in other disciplines transparent, in a tutorial way, but anyone who thinks rigorously about the "quality" of forecasts will make the connection. An essential, and universal concept demonstrated from meteorology is the realization of "quality-value reversals" in which forecasts with higher "quality" (quantified by traditional error measures such as correlation or RMS error) have lower "value" in terms of net benefit of the forecast when used in a specific decision making context. This fundamental concept is well extablished in other fields with high-stakes forecast-based decisions (, e.g. medical decision making) and should be fundamental to any development/evaluation of forecasts (meteorologiical or otherwise).