Was the forecast right for Denver on Fri Jul 31?
Denver, Colorado · daily high temperature in °F · forecasts from each model's archived runs, verified against the ECMWF IFS analysis
6 days out, 7 models put Denver's Fri Jul 31 high anywhere from 90° to 102°;by the final call, the day before, the field had settled to a median of 88°. The day verified at 89° against the ECMWF IFS analysis, with 0.06 in of precipitation — drizzle.
ICON landed closest, off by 0.1°. ECMWF ran 3° cool.
What every model said, at every lead
Daily-high calls for Fri Jul 31 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 Denver scoreboard shows them, labelled.
| Lead | AIFS | AIGFS | ECMWF | GEM | GFS | ICON | UKMO | Range |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 6d · 2026-07-25 | 91° | 90° | 91° | 90° | 102° | 93° | 97° | 90–102° |
| 5d · 2026-07-26 | 88° | 90° | 89° | 94° | 100° | 102° | 98° | 88–102° |
| 4d · 2026-07-27 | 91° | 90° | 94° | 94° | 98° | 98° | 97° | 90–98° |
| 3d · 2026-07-28 | 87° | 86° | 86° | 88° | 97° | 93° | 93° | 86–97° |
| 2d · 2026-07-29 | 87° | 87° | 84° | 85° | 94° | 93° | 89° | 84–94° |
| 1d · 2026-07-30 | 88° | 87° | 86° | 87° | 91° | 89° | 92° | 86–92° |
| actual | 89° |
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 Denver — 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 ECMWF IFS analysis (temperature_2m_max). 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.