Was the forecast right for Chicago on Mon Aug 24?
Chicago, Illinois · daily high temperature in °F · forecasts from each model's archived runs, verified against the MDW observations
4 days out, 7 models put Chicago's Mon Aug 24 high anywhere from 74° to 83°;by the final call, the day before, the field had settled to a median of 78°. The day verified at 79° against the MDW observations — partly cloudy.
UKMO landed closest, off by 0.8°. GEM ran 5° warm.
What every model said, at every lead
Daily-high calls for Mon Aug 24 as each model's runs approached it — the last archived run per day. NBM and The Spread's own blend are consensus products and stay out of these ranges and rankings; the Chicago scoreboard shows them, labelled.
| Lead | AIFS | AIGFS | ECMWF | GEM | GFS | ICON | UKMO | Range |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 4d · 2026-08-20 | 74° | 77° | 76° | 74° | 83° | 77° | 79° | 74–83° |
| 3d · 2026-08-21 | 75° | 75° | 75° | 77° | 80° | 76° | 77° | 75–80° |
| 2d · 2026-08-22 | 75° | 74° | 75° | 77° | 80° | 76° | 78° | 74–80° |
| 1d · 2026-08-23 | 74° | 75° | 77° | 84° | 80° | 78° | 78° | 74–84° |
| actual | 79° |
Read it honestly
This is one date, not a league table. A model can win a day it deserved to lose; rankings only mean something over a window. For that, see which model has been most accurate in Chicago — or every city The Spread scores.
Forecasts are what each model's archived runs said at the time, captured at The Spread's sweep times — never reconstructed after the fact. Truth is the MDW observations. The actual values are the ones in hand when this receipt was settled, usually 2 days after the date; a correction published after that is not carried into it. Archive depth varies by city; receipts exist only for dates the archive watched arrive.