Curious weather briefing

[CMongoose]

These two airports are 8 miles apart. I’m not totally sure what to do with this briefing. One reporting 25g50 and the apocalypse and the other reporting 7kt winds with some light showers for the same period.

Any thoughts on what might be going on here? Surely forecasts aren’t that precise and localized.

 

[Htaylor]

TAFs are very localized. 5 statute miles radius from the center of an aerodrome. Their precision is open to question, but in over 40 years of flying, I've found them to fairly accurate, even in Alaska. Then again, weather prediction is a best guess more often than not. Since the 25G50 is a TEMPO and TSRA associated, I'd say it may or may not happen.

 

[WannFly]

associated with TS it could happen though i dont know if they can predict with that much accuracy, may be they can. a while back i was puttering around for no reason, i was planning to come inbound when i heard tower cleared some poor soul to land at 25G32 on 18, i had taken off 40 mins prior with 9 kts, i eventually landed 10 miles away and it was calm there and i could see some swirling cloud action over KFAR. the whole situation disappeared in about 20 mins as the system tracked north.

 

[RussR]

KCEF is a military field, right? Or at least the weather forecast office appears to be military, note the use of the "BECMG", which fell out of favor in FAA TAFs some times back (years ago anyway).

So, possibly what you have here is a difference between NOAA forecasters and military forecasters disagreeing.

If you read the forecast discussion, you will often see things like "there is a chance of thunderstorms, but confidence is not high enough to include in the TAF at this time". This could be a situation where the NOAA forecaster didn't think confidence was high enough but the military forecaster did.

We have two airports here with a similar distance and military vs. civilian, OKC and TIK. And, anecdotally, when the weather might be bad, it sure does seem like the military airfield always has the worse weather forecast.

 

[Shepherd]

Two mistakes:
1. You read the weather report.
2. You believed they knew what they were talking about.
For some reason, weather reporting has been getting really off and irregular in my neck of the woods.
Apparently others are seeing the same thing.

 

[Tommar98]

KCEF is always forecasting Armageddon from what KBAF reports. I have KBAF to me more in line with what I see flying out of 7B2.


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