Was the forecast right for Detroit on Mon Aug 31?
Detroit, Michigan · daily high temperature in °F · forecasts from each model's archived runs, verified against the DTW observations
6 days out, 7 models put Detroit's Mon Aug 31 high anywhere from 80° to 95°;by the final call, the day before, the field had settled to a median of 83°. The day verified at 86° against the DTW observations, with 0.07 in of precipitation — drizzle.
ECMWF landed closest, off by 0.7°. AIGFS ran 6° cool.
What every model said, at every lead
Daily-high calls for Mon Aug 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 Detroit scoreboard shows them, labelled.
| Lead | AIFS | AIGFS | ECMWF | GEM | GFS | ICON | UKMO | Range |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 6d · 2026-08-25 | 92° | 91° | 95° | 92° | 80° | 90° | 88° | 80–95° |
| 5d · 2026-08-26 | 84° | 87° | 94° | 90° | 85° | 92° | 90° | 84–94° |
| 4d · 2026-08-27 | 80° | 88° | 91° | 90° | 90° | 84° | 90° | 80–91° |
| 3d · 2026-08-28 | 81° | 78° | 87° | 89° | 87° | 86° | 90° | 78–90° |
| 2d · 2026-08-29 | 79° | 77° | 89° | 86° | 81° | 87° | 83° | 77–89° |
| 1d · 2026-08-30 | 82° | 80° | 85° | 81° | 85° | 83° | 89° | 80–89° |
| actual | 86° |
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 Detroit — 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 DTW 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.