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Which weather model is most accurate in your city?

The Spread — the forecast spread — archives what every major model predicted, then scores those forecasts against what actually happened. The honest headline, most days and most places: it's close. Where nobody leads by more than the noise, this page says so and shows the whole field — a crown won by a tenth of a degree is a coin flip wearing a ribbon. Pick a city:

Every model's typical miss at one day out — one dot per model, every city on one scale.
City The race Verdict Spread today
Atlanta, Georgia ECMWF & AIGFS within 0.19°C 4°C
Berlin, State of Berlin GFS & UKMO within 0.19°C 3°C
Boston, Massachusetts ICON & GEM within 0.11°C 2°C
Buffalo, New York GFS by 0.25°C over UKMO 4°C
Charlotte, North Carolina ECMWF & GEM level 4°C
Chicago, Illinois ICON & GFS within 0.16°C 2°C
Dallas, Texas — — 2°C
Denver, Colorado ECMWF & UKMO within 0.15°C 3°C
Detroit, Michigan UKMO & ICON within 0.22°C 3°C
Houston, Texas AIGFS & ICON within 0.02°C 2°C
London, England ICON & GFS within 0.12°C 2°C
Los Angeles, California GFS & ECMWF level 3°C
Miami, Florida AIGFS & ICON within 0.02°C 5°C
Milan, Lombardy ICON by 0.28°C over UKMO 2°C
Minneapolis, Minnesota UKMO & GEM within 0.1°C 4°C
New Orleans, Louisiana ICON & AIGFS within 0.13°C 2°C
New York, New York AIFS by 0.3°C over ECMWF 3°C
Oklahoma City, Oklahoma GEM & UKMO within 0.07°C 2°C
Orlando, Florida AIGFS by 0.54°C over GEM 4°C
Paris, Île-de-France Region GFS & ICON within 0.01°C 2°C
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania GFS & UKMO within 0.11°C 2°C
Phoenix, Arizona GFS & ECMWF within 0.03°C 1°C
Salt Lake City, Utah GFS & ICON within 0.17°C 6°C
San Antonio, Texas GFS & ECMWF within 0.06°C 4°C
San Diego, California ICON & GEM within 0.11°C 4°C
San Francisco, California ECMWF & GFS within 0.09°C 6°C
Seattle, Washington GEM & UKMO within 0.03°C 4°C
St. Louis, Missouri ICON & ECMWF within 0.02°C 5°C
Tampa, Florida AIGFS by 0.25°C over ICON 4°C
Washington, District of Columbia GEM & UKMO within 0.01°C 1°C

What one scored day looks like

The most recent day we settled, whichever way it went — not the one that flatters the models.

14 days out, 4 models put Oklahoma City's Thu Sep 17 high anywhere from 23° to 37°; by the final call they had settled to a median of 36°. It hit 37° — ICON landed closest, off 0.2°.

Each bar is the full range of the models still forecasting that day, in °C; the rule is what the OKC observations recorded. This one opened 14° wide and closed to 2°. Across every day we have scored, the range narrows even though more models arrive as the day approaches — a median 11.6° at 13 days out with four models, 5.8° on the day with seven. See this day's full receipt →

More scored days

The next-most-recent settled days across the archive — records, not rankings: each bar is the models' opening range, the rule is what happened.

  • Seattle · Thu Sep 17

    4 models opened 19–25° at 14 days out; it hit 25° — GFS closest, off 0.6°.

    Full receipt →

  • Salt Lake City · Thu Sep 17

    4 models opened 26–32° at 14 days out; it hit 30° — GEM closest, off 0.6°.

    Full receipt →

  • Phoenix · Thu Sep 17

    4 models opened 34–38° at 13 days out; it hit 32° — ECMWF closest, off 0.5°.

    Full receipt →

  • Orlando · Thu Sep 17

    4 models opened 28–36° at 14 days out; it hit 31° — GEM closest, off 0.1°.

    Full receipt →

How the scoring works

Each model's 1-, 3-, and 7-day-ahead forecasts are captured from its actual archived runs (nothing is reconstructed after the fact), then verified against each city's truth — its own station's observations where one is pinned, the ECMWF IFS analysis otherwise — once the day has happened. Bias is the mean signed error of the predicted daily high — positive means the model ran warm. The typical miss (MAE) is the average absolute error. Cities join these pages as they join The Spread's archive.

Two things you should know about the yardstick. Where a city is pinned to its own station, models are verified against that thermometer's observed highs outright, and the city page names the station. Everywhere else, truth is the ECMWF IFS analysis — ECMWF's operational product, a grid rather than a thermometer, while two of the seven models scored here are ECMWF's own. Every registry city has been pinned to its station since 2026-08-22, so the grid is the yardstick only for places no thermometer serves, and those pages say so.

The Spread itself is in closed beta — these verification pages and the Updates log are public while the rest of the product is gated. If you want in, ask for an invite — say where you forecast and I will send you one.